While research in teacher professional development (PD) has focused on numerous topics, not much is known about how teachers understand the notion of PD. Studying this topic is important because, for PD to be effective, all parties involved in its design and implementation need to have a common understanding of the scope and purposes of PD. We…

The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of US schools associated with two measures of scientific literacy (content knowledge and "procedural and epistemic" knowledge) using the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Because outcomes are nested within students, and students within schools, a…

Since knowledge and skills related to curriculum content and pedagogy are crucial for teachers, it is of interest to explore the research relating to what preservice teachers know and can do. Refereed journal articles published between 2005 and 2015 that reported on the assessment of the knowledge or skills of Australian preservice teachers are…

Knowledge about different health-related attitudes, beliefs, and risks is of significant interest to scholars in different Social Science disciplines. Usually knowledge is collected in a form of multiple variables and then constructed as a composite indicator. The question any researcher working with knowledge-related variables faces is: what is…

Parents and non-parental adults who interact with children influence child development. This study evaluates the knowledge of child development in two large and diverse samples of adults from Alberta in 2007 and 2013. Telephone interviews were completed by two random samples (1,443 in 2007; 1,451 in 2013). Participants were asked when specific…

The purpose of this study is to explore the strength of relationships between 7th grade students' Scientific Process Skills (SPS), Nature of Science (NOS) beliefs, and Scientific Creativity (SC) through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). For this purpose, data were collected from 332 students of two public middle school students in Turkey. SPS,…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

This research examined whether the informational advantage of an animation over a static picture (and over no visualizations as a control condition) can be compensated by presenting the information in the text that constitutes this informational advantage. In addition, it was investigated whether learners' spatial abilities acted as a compensator…

This study aims to identify an adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Revealing students' conceptual understanding is an important step towards developing effective curricula, assessment and aligned teaching strategies to enhance conceptual understanding in higher education. Essays and concept…

The study addresses professional vision, including the abilities of selective attention and knowledge-based reasoning. This article focuses on the latter ability. Groups with different sport-specific and pedagogical expertise (n = 60) were compared according to their observation and interpretation of sport activities in a four-field design. The…

Concept maps have a long history in educational settings as a tool for teaching, learning, and assessing. As an assessment tool, they are predominantly used to extract the structural configuration of learners' knowledge. This article presents an investigation of the knowledge structures of a large group of beginning CS students. The investigation…

The increase in the cost of college textbooks together with the proliferation of digital content and devices has inspired the development of open textbooks, open educational resources that are free, openly licensed, and often peer-reviewed. Although several published studies have investigated the impact of open textbook adoption on educational…

This study aimed to explore students' cognitive patterns based on their knowledge and levels. Participants were seventh graders from a junior high school in China. Three relatively distinct groups were specified by Cluster Analysis: high knowledge and low ability, low knowledge and low ability, and high knowledge and high ability. The group of low…

The inclusive education framework and the increase in autism diagnoses have led to an overwhelming challenge for pre-service teachers who need to be qualified to teach all children. To test the quality of their training, the main purpose of this study was to compare 866 pre-service teachers' knowledge, misconceptions, and gaps about autism in…

Previous work on seductive details has demonstrated that interesting but irrelevant messages hinder students' text learning. Considering that there is little evidence suggesting the relationship between seductive details and prior knowledge, the present study examined how seductive details affect learning in terms of prior knowledge to address the…