Metacognition is defined as a higher-order thinking skill that enables individuals to monitor, control, and regulate their thinking and behavior. In education, this skill is important, as learners need to self-regulate their learning behaviors for successful lifelong learning. Thus, it is essential for educators and learners alike to know their…

Starting in April 2025, ACT will introduce enhanced forms of the ACT® test for national online testing, with a full rollout to all paper and online test takers in national, state and district, and international test administrations by Spring 2026. ACT introduced major updates by changing the test lengths and testing times, providing more time per…

Reviews of social comparison processes in school contexts have concluded that individual differences in propensity to compare with others are likely to be important in the classroom, but that there is a paucity of evidence testing this key proposition. To address this gap, we developed and validated a new measure of propensity to engage in…

This study investigates the validity and reliability of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) in the context of blended learning. In the digital age, the fusion of online components with traditional classroom instruction has become integral to modern pedagogy, giving rise to blended learning--a flexible approach accommodating diverse learning…

The effects of different response option orders on survey responses have been studied extensively. The typical research design involves examining the differences in response characteristics between conditions with the same item stems and response option orders that differ in valence--either incrementally arranged (e.g., strongly disagree to…

In Germany enrolment in majors is of considerable interest to academic departments, because their budget depends on the number of enrolled students. Besides observed factors, we presume that unobserved latent variables influence the major-choice decision of students. Using stated preferences data from a discrete choice experiment among students…

Academic stress, an endemic phenomenon in higher education, presents a multifaceted challenge, manifesting as cognitive overload, affective dysregulation and physiological destabilisation. It leads to recurrent feedback loops that reinforce anxiety and frustration, intensifying maladaptive stress responses. This study examines the extent to which…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

The main goal of the current study is to develop a reliable instrument to measure programming anxiety in university students. A pool of 33 items based on extensive literature review and experts' opinions were created by researchers. The draft scale comprised three factors applied to 392 university students from two different universities in Turkey…

Secondary education students do not usually perceive history as a subject connected with their lives, backgrounds and interests. At the same time, prospective and in-service teachers do not always have a coherent vision of this discipline, which can reflect on their students' perceptions. This study makes use of a theoretical framework developed…

The relevance of academic self-efficacy for educational outcomes is well documented. Pre-academic self-efficacy has hardly been studied, and only one study was found to include an assessment of the measurement invariance of the scale used. The aims were to validate the Pre-Academic Learning Self-Efficacy (PAL-SE) scale in a non-university higher…

This study reports an analysis of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) using item response curves (IRC)--the fraction of students selecting each response to an item as a function of their total score. Three large samples (N = 9606, 4360, and 1439) of calculus-based physics students were analyzed. These were drawn from three land-grant institutions…

Purpose: The ability to perform motor imagery (MI) might be impaired by the physical fatigue elicited during training. Interestingly, there is also theoretical support for a more limited influence of fatigue in the existing literature. Method: We evaluated MI ability before and after two exercise protocols: (i) a continuous exercise of 20 min…

Conceptual Metaphor (CM; e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Kovecses, 2020) is central to our thinking and ubiquitously manifested in our language. Given its importance, the teaching of conceptual metaphors has gained much attention in Cognitive Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. While most empirical studies have focused on specific aspects…

Testing organizations are faced with increasing demand to provide subscores in addition to the total test score. However, psychometricians argue that most subscores do not have added value to be worth reporting. To have added value, subscores need to meet a number of criteria: they should be reliable, distinctive, and distinct from each other and…