In our fast-changing and technology-driven societies, education in mathematics and science is crucial for ensuring that children and young people have the necessary skills, knowledge and mindset to be responsible and active citizens. Despite the emphasis on the key competences of basic numeracy and scientific literacy in the European Education…

Staggered adoption of policies by different units at different times creates promising opportunities for observational causal inference. Estimation remains challenging, however, and common regression methods can give misleading results. A promising alternative is the synthetic control method (SCM), which finds a weighted average of control units…

The work in this dissertation is presented in two parts. The first part (Chapters 3 and 4) details work relating to students' explanations of reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry. The second part (Chapters 5 and 6) details work relating to the evaluating the uptake of research-based instructional practices in introductory chemistry,…

A 2020 study from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media found that since 2004 over one-quarter of U.S. newspapers have disappeared. This reduction has left many people, especially those in poor rural areas, living in news deserts, where access to professionally vetted information is limited, if not…

Adolescence is a critical developmental period that is marked by drastic changes in face recognition, which are reflected in patterns of bias (i.e., superior recognition for some individuals compared to others). Here, we evaluate how race is perceived during face recognition and whether adolescents exhibit an own-race bias (ORB). We conducted a…

Computational Thinking (CT) is considered a core 21st century digital skill. The aspect of assessment is crucial and knowing what, who, when, how, and where to assess is important for assessment design. In this study, we conducted an umbrella review to gain insights regarding CT assessment in higher education. In total, we analyzed 11 reviews,…

Psychological theory suggests that evaluators' individual values and traits play a fundamental role in evaluation practice, though few empirical studies have explored those constructs in evaluators. This paper describes an empirical study on evaluators' individual, work, and political values, as well as their personality traits to predict…

We argue that assessment and feedback practices in higher education need to be transformed to better address three purposes: "promoting" learning, "assuring" assessment rigour, and "communicating" students' employability. To address shortcomings in the current assessment and feedback culture, we propose programmatic…

This article evaluates the predictions of an algorithmic-level distributed associative memory model as it introduces, propagates, and resolves ambiguity, and compares it to the predictions of computational-level parallel parsing models in which ambiguous analyses are accounted separately in discrete distributions. By superposing activation…

This article explores underlying mechanisms triggering a change in conceptualization of innovation in the European Union (EU), the impact of this change on institutional demands upon European universities and implications for evaluation procedures. We mobilize the theoretical concept of critical junctures to explore significant periods that have…

We investigated three different approaches for quantifying individual change and reporting it back to persons: (a) the common change score, which is obtained by first computing scale scores from two consecutive measurements and then subtract these scores from one another, (b) the ad-hoc approach, which is similar to the former approach but uses…

The purpose of this exploratory descriptive research was to examine what Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) certified Montessori teachers (MTs) for students ages 3-6 years in the United States reported regarding scientific observation (SO) as a disposition and as a disposition in action (DIA) to better understand MTs' application of…

Metrics-based reasoning patterns diffuse from core to periphery as peripheral and semi-peripheral countries adopt Western evaluation standards as formal categories or cultural scripts. While these scripts are applied across disciplines, each field maintains its own traditional criteria for scientific assessment. Consequently, scholars navigate…

Multidimensional measuring instruments are often used in behavioral, social, educational, marketing, and biomedical research. For these scales, the paper discusses how to find the optimal score based on their components that is associated with the highest possible reliability. Within the framework of structural equation modeling, an approach to…

Though there is evidence autism identification has been inequitable for populations who are culturally and linguistically minoritized, there is limited research that explains the issue of disproportionality and factors contributing to its occurrence, especially within an educational setting. To explore contributors to racial/ethnic disparities in…