Introduction: Students often answer questions from available expository texts for assessment and learning purposes. These activities require readers to activate not only meaning-making processes (e.g., paraphrases or elaborations), but also metacognitive operations (e.g., monitoring readers' own comprehension or self-regulating reading behaviors)…

Student insight into algebraic formulas, including the ability to identify the structure of a formula and its components and to reason with and about formulas, is an issue in mathematics education. In this study, we investigated how 16- and 17-year-old pre-university students' insight into algebraic formulas can be promoted through graphing…

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school…

This study focuses on the development of the understanding of historical time of pupils in primary school. We present a developmental model with three stages: "emergent," "initial" and "continued" understanding of historical time. Based on this model, we constructed an instrument to measure how pupils aged 6-12…

Background: Studies have shown that students' knowledge of osmosis and diffusion and the concepts associated with these processes is often inaccurate. This is important to address, as these concepts not only provide the foundation for more advanced topics in biology and chemistry, but are also threaded throughout both state and national science…

State tests, which assess reading comprehension, ask students to make inferences and connections beyond the text. The problem of practice in which this study is situated is that students are having difficulty making meaningful connections and developing inferences in relation to the material that is read aloud together in class or assigned for…

Although much is known about how students perform on standardized tests, little research exists concerning how students think and process while taking such tests. This mixed methods action research study was designed to investigate if a constructivist approach to test preparation could yield improved results for 37 English language arts freshmen…