Combining mathematical and physical understanding in reasoning is difficult, and a growing body of research shows that students experience problems with the combination of physics and mathematics in reasoning beyond the introductory level. We investigated students' reasoning about boundary conditions (BCs) for the diffusion equation by conducting…

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…

This paper marks the second in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. Twenty-first century skills (21CS) are now…

The study developed and applied an index for measuring the level of complexity of full authentic scientific inquiry. Complexity is a fundamental attribute of real life scientific research. The level of complexity is an overall reflection of complex cognitive and metacognitive processes which are required for navigating the authentic inquiry…

Studies analyzing explanations that have been constructed by science students have found that they were generally weak and lack necessary features. The goal of this study was to establish the competencies that one needs to construct a scientific explanation. Scientific explanations can be looked at in three ways, in terms of their function, form…

Numerous diagnostic studies have been conducted on large-scale assessments to illustrate the students' mastery profile in the areas of math and reading; however, for science a limited number of investigations are reported. This study investigated Iranian eighth graders' competency mastery of science and examined the utility of the General…

In the present study, we have explored an aspect of teachers' perceptions of biology diagrams. The research was performed in Turkey. The data were gathered from 50 (25 female, 25 male) teachers of primary and secondary schools and 34 (18 female, 16 male) academic staff of different universities in Turkey. Some of the participants are science…

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…

When thinking about talk and discussion in primary science, the author often returns to the little gem of a book by Douglas Barnes--"From communication to curriculum" (1976). Barnes used observations of science lessons to make cogent points about the value of talk for both thinking and communication. A useful distinction that he…

These proceedings contain 48 presentations and 15 poster abstracts. Papers include "Computer Tasks Required in Selected Undergraduate Agriculture Courses" (Johnson, Ferguson, Vokinnns, Lester); "College of Agriculture Faculty Perceptions of Electronic Technologies in Teaching" (Dooley, Murphy); "Steering Through Turbulent…