We compared high school students' performance in a traditional comprehension assessment requiring them to identify key information and draw inferences from single texts, and a scenario-based assessment (SBA) requiring them to integrate, evaluate and apply information across multiple sources. Both assessments focused on a non-academic topic.…

This paper examined the effects of online English-medium instruction (EMI) on high school students' performing English face threatening speech acts, by assessing indirect expressions and token agreement (agreement plus but). Participants completed an English placement test and English pretest and posttest through a Google survey. English…

A central issue in the design of curricula for all school levels is the development of the learners' high-order thinking skills and metacognitive skills. Among such required skills is the ability to solve problems. The literature dealing with the development of problem-solving skills is vast and primarily addresses the scientific disciplines, even…

Dimensional comparison theory (DCT; Möller & Marsh, 2013) assumes that students compare their academic achievement intraindividually across domains to form domain-specific self-concepts. Upward dimensional comparisons are believed to lead to lower self-concepts in the worse-off domain, while downward dimensional comparisons should lead to…

In this paper we focus on how South African students' ideas about the human body are constituted in their descriptions of three different scenarios involving the pathway of a sandwich, a painkiller and a glass of water through the body. In particular, we have studied the way in which the students transferred ideas between the sandwich and the…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs, as well as for providing feedback to teachers and administrators. In this study, the authors examined whether using anchoring vignettes in web-based surveys improved the validity of teachers' self-assessments…

Seeking to increase conceptual understanding by sustaining adolescents' engagement and interest in secondary science classrooms, an intervention, the Engagement Model of Academic Literacy for Learning (EngageALL), was designed to implement a disciplinary literacy approach and organize instruction according to characteristics of student interest…

Background: Case-based learning (CBL) is simply teaching the concept to the students based on the cases. CBL involves a case, which is a scenario based on daily life, and study questions related to the case, which allows students to discuss their ideas. Chemical kinetics is one of the most difficult concepts for students in chemistry. Students…

The purpose of this study was to explore the engineering problem finding ability of high school students at three high schools in Minnesota. Students at each of the three schools had differing backgrounds including pre-engineering coursework, traditional technology education coursework and advanced science coursework. Students were asked to find…

As everyone enters the 21st Century there is a great deal of discussion in business and education circles alike about the type of skills the youth will need to survive and thrive in this century. At the same time, there is little known today about the level of 21st Century skills students currently have. In part this is because, as a nation,…