The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is an instrument which is widely used in physics education to characterize students' attitudes toward physics and learning physics and compare them with those of experts. While CLASS has been extensively validated for use in the context of higher education institutions in the United…

The aim of this qualitative case study was to determine the cognitive and metacognitive strategies used by the Secondary School 6th grade students while reading science texts in a Biology unit titled "Support and Motor System", and to compare these strategies in accordance with the type of their school (private or state school), their…

Background: Self-regulated learning (SRL) models position metacognitive monitoring as central to SRL processing and predictive of student learning outcomes (Winne & Hadwin, 2008; Zimmerman, 2000). A body of research evidence also indicates that depth of strategy use, ranging from surface to deep processing, is predictive of learning…

Even if national and international assessments are designed to be comparable, subsequent psychometric analyses often reveal differential item functioning (DIF). Central to achieving comparability is to examine the presence of DIF, and if DIF is found, to investigate its sources to ensure differentially functioning items that do not lead to bias.…

This study used an interactive dynamic simulation of action potential to explore social practices of learning among first year undergraduate biology students. It aimed to create a learning environment that fosters knowledge building discourse through working with multiple concept-specific representations. Three hundred and eighty-nine students and…

Students have difficulty understanding ecosystem concepts. This article argues that the difficulty stems partly from not grasping the underlying causality that structures the concepts. We report on an intervention study designed to teach eight- and nine-year-olds to reason about domino, cyclic, and mutual causality by infusing causally focused…