With regard to the moderate performance of German students in international large-scale assessments, one branch of German science education research is concerned with the construction and evaluation of competence models. Based on the theory-driven definition of competence levels, these models imply a correlation between the complexity of a…

A common challenge in the evaluation of K-12 science education is identifying valid scales that are an appropriate fit for both a student's age and the educational outcomes of interest. Though many new scales have been validated in recent years, there is much to learn about the appropriate educational contexts and audiences for these measures.…

This article characterizes "engagement in science learning" from a sociocultural perspective and offers a mixed method approach to measuring engagement that combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) and social network analysis (SNA). Conceptualizing engagement from a sociocultural perspective, the article discusses the advantages of a…

In recent science education, experimentation features ever more strongly as a method of inquiry in science classes rather than as a means to illustrate phenomena. Ideas and materials to teach inquiry abound. Yet, tools for assessing students' achievement in their processes of experimentation are lacking. The present study assumes a basal,…

Given the importance of explanation in science texts for children, this research explored Coh-Metrix as a tool for rapidly determining the presence of explanations in science trade books. Variables from Coh-Metrix specifically addressing cause ("causal content," "causal cohesion," and "positive causal connectives")…

Visual processing breaks the world into parts and objects, allowing us not only to examine the pieces individually, but also to perceive the relationships among them. There is work exploring how we perceive spatial relationships within structures with existing representations, such as faces, common objects, or prototypical scenes. But strikingly,…

Research Findings: The present study observed and coded instruction in 65 preschool classrooms to examine (a) overall amounts and (b) types of mathematics and science learning opportunities experienced by preschool children as well as (c) the extent to which these opportunities were associated with classroom and program characteristics. Results…

The transfer of knowledge is considered to be a fundamental goal of education; therefore, knowing and understanding the conditions that influence the efficiency of the transfer from learning activity to problem solving play a decisive role in the improvement of science education. In this article, the results of a study of 196 high school students'…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…

In this study, we analyzed the quality of students' written scientific explanations found in notebooks and explored the link between the quality of the explanations and students' learning. We propose an approach to systematically analyzing and scoring the quality of students' explanations based on three components: claim, evidence to support it,…