Science academic achievement is a key construct for examining students' science learning outcomes. While international comparative assessments like TIMSS and PISA have shown high science achievement of Korean middle school students, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation of factors influencing the achievement using domestic data.…

The purpose of the study was to determine the level of the relationship among Turkish elementary school students' personal epistemologies, motivation, learning strategies, and achievements in science. A total of 322 fifth-grade students participated in the study. Results from the structural equation modeling showed that students' personal…

Students evaluate their achievement in a specific domain in relation to their achievement in other domains and form their self-concepts accordingly. These comparison processes have been termed "dimensional comparisons" and shown to be an important source of academic self-concepts in addition to social and temporal comparisons. Research…

This article reports on an empirical exploration of the relations and strengths among Turkish grades 9-11 students' (n = 209) personal epistemologies (justification of knowledge, certainty of knowledge, source of knowledge, development of knowledge), self-regulated learning (extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, rehearsal, elaboration,…

Informal science learning has been found to have effects on students' science learning. Through the use of secondary data from a national assessment of 7410 middle school students in China, this study explores the relationship among five types of extracurricular science activities, learning interests, academic self-concept, and science…

Middle school has been documented as the period in which a drop in students' science interest and achievement occurs. This trend indicates a lack of motivation for learning science; however, little is known about how different aspects of motivation interact with student engagement and science learning outcomes. This study examines the…

This study focuses on "high achievement but low motivation" phenomenon that is prevalent in East Asian countries and districts, and uses eighth graders in Taipei that participated in TIMSS 2007 as an example to examine the direct and indirect effects of academic motivation, positive affect, and instruction on science achievement.…

Teachers make a difference for the outcome of their students in science classrooms. One focus in this context lies on teachers' professional knowledge. We describe this knowledge according to three domains, namely (1) content knowledge (CK), (2) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and (3) curricular knowledge (CuK). We hypothesise a positive…

We investigated students' perceptions related to psychological constructs in their science classes and the influence of these perceptions on their science identification and science career goals. Participants included 575 middle school students from two countries (334 students in the U.S. and 241 students in Iceland). Students completed a…

We use data from a randomized controlled trial of a middle school science intervention to explore the causal mechanisms by which the intervention produced previously documented gains in student achievement. Our study finds that implementation fidelity, operationalized as a measure of the frequency of implementation of the cognitive science…

We study whether changes in school emphasis on academic success (SEAS) and safe schools (SAFE) may explain the increased science performance in Norway between TIMSS 2007 and 2011. Two-level structural equation modelling (SEM) of merged TIMSS data was used to investigate whether changes in levels of SEAS and SAFE mediate the changes in science…

This study explored the relationship between the reading ability and science achievement of students in grades 5, 8, and 9. Reading ability was assessed with four measures: word recognition, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and comprehension (23% of all passages were on science topics). Science achievement was assessed with state…

This study, drawing on data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011, examined whether mathematics teachers' perceptions of their students' mathematical competence were related to mathematics achievement, affect toward mathematics, and engagement in mathematics lessons among Grade 8 students in Singapore and…

Large-scale studies, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), provide data to understand cross-national differences and similarities. In this study, we aimed to identify factors predicting mathematics achievement of Turkish students by comparing to Australian students. First, construct equivalence and item bias…

Recent studies on professional development programs indicate these programs, when sustained, have a positive impact on student achievement; however, many of these studies have failed to use longitudinal data. The purpose of this study is to understand how one particular instructional practice (STEM PBL) used consistently influences student…