This study aimed to develop a comprehensive diagnostic tool for assessing upper-secondary school students' understanding of isomers, expanding upon existing two- and three-tier conceptual diagnostic methods. By incorporating 'Confidence Rating Factor' tiers within the answer and reason sections, a four-tier test was designed and developed. This…

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is one of the research-based assessments established by the physics education research community to measure students' understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Former works have often recorded the notion of gendered mean FCI scores favoring male students notably in the North American (NA) based studies. Nevertheless,…

In order to ensure content validity by covering a broad range of content domains, the testing times of some educational large-scale assessments last up to a total of two hours or more. Performance decline over the course of taking the test has been extensively documented in the literature. It can occur due to increases in the numbers of: (a)…

This research explores the effects of listening to music during exams for engineering college students. Students were given the option to listen to self-selected music while completing exams in three undergraduate engineering courses over four years. It was found that listening to music during an exam had no significant effect on the mean exam…

Background/Context: In order to stimulate national and regional economic growth, policymakers and businesses have expressed great interest in growing the supply of workers with skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). At the same time, considerable efforts are being devoted to narrowing race and gender gaps in the STEM training…

The problem addressed by this study was to determine the influence of high school start times on students' academic achievement and precisely how this impacts the scores students received on the Biology I End of Course Exams. It also determined if there was a difference in influence between males and females. This was determined by comparing the…

Many undergraduate chemistry students hold alternate conceptions related to resonance--an important and fundamental topic of organic chemistry. To help address these alternate conceptions, an organic chemistry instructor could administer the resonance concept inventory (RCI), which is a multiple-choice assessment that was designed to identify…

International large-scale assessments (ILSA) are an important source of information for education policymakers across the globe. Despite sponsors' warnings, when results are published, media attention focuses on country rankings and changes in scores. Score changes are evaluated using a two-sided z-statistic, with statistical significance declared…

Question generation is theorized to support comprehension, self-regulation, and achievement, yet the empirical base for whether and how student-generated questions are associated with comprehension monitoring and whether they predict performance remain open questions. To address these, we investigated the questions undergraduate students in an…

The current dropout rate in physics studies in Germany is about 60%, with the majority of dropouts occurring in the first year. Consequently, the physics study entry phase poses a significant challenge for many students. Students' stress perceptions can provide more profound insights into the processes and challenges during that period. In a panel…

We address two persistent challenges in large-scale assessments of the Next Generation Science Standards: (a) the validity of score interpretations that target the standards broadly and (b) how to structure claims for assessments of this complex domain. The NGSS pose a particular challenge for specifying claims about students that evidence from…

We investigate a personal response system (PRS) pedagogy for lecture halls that encourages active engagement yet lowers barriers for implementation by eliminating the need to address student requests to make up questions because students must answer (not necessarily correctly) only more than half (greater than or equal 50%) of PRS questions to…

This research explores the effect of mental model-based learning on understanding school chemistry. The learning activity included group discussion, presentation and class discussion. Pre-service chemistry teachers (PCT) analyzed school chemistry topics in relation to essential underlying concepts. The development of mental models was monitored…

This ex-post facto quantitative study examined how a comprehensive STEM education program impacts high school students' ACT math and science scores as well as their attitudes toward STEM. Using data from one STEM-designated school, the researcher examined ACT math, science, and STEM results for students who took the ACT in the Spring of 2024,…

In this study, we explore the use of analogies with classical physics in introductory quantum physics (QP) teaching. This work is part of a larger project in which a learning sequence covering three introductory QP topics was designed, tested, and evaluated in collaboration with high school teachers and physics education researchers. Based on the…