Gendered barriers in education and attrition along the academic and professional pipeline are key determinants of the current STEM skills shortage. While enrolment in STEM undergraduate courses has been increasing in the recent decades, STEM degree choices still suffer from considerable gender imbalance, whereby women are underrepresented in…

Students' causal attributions about the reasons underlying their academic successes are important because of the influence of those attributions on academic motivation. We investigated whether students' success attributions tend to be similar across academic subjects versus specific to academic domain, and whether domain-generality or specificity…

High academic standards are an important first step in ensuring that all Alaska's students have the tools they need for success. These standards reflect the collaborative work of Alaskan educators and national experts from the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. Further, they are informed by public comments.…

This study examined relationships between five personal traits and adolescents' creative activities and accomplishments in five domains--music, visual arts, creative writing, science, and technology. Participants were 439 tenth graders (220 males and 219 females) in China. The relationships were examined using confirmatory factor analysis.…

From Dewey to the Standards, inquiry has been an increasingly prominent theme in multiple science education reform movements, yet the transition from theory and advocacy to practice and policy has been disappointing. While there is a growing body of research which suggests that student understanding is enhanced by inquiry-based teaching, only…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to provide the evidence for the reliability of the modified Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Attitude Scales (FSMAS), as translated to Turkish language and transformed to the educational technology context, and (2) to investigate high school students' motivation to use technology for learning by a comparative…

A survey of 6th-12th grade students was conducted to measure their science-related attitudes and interests. Significant gender differences were found among these students. Females reported more anxiety about science as well as less motivation in and enjoyment of science than males. In spite of their unfavorable attitudes toward science, a large…

The present study aims at unravelling the myriad of student-level (i.e., gender, socioeconomic status [SES], academic self-concept, achievement, ability, and occupational interests) and school-level (i.e., gender composition, maths composition, and SES composition) determinants of option choice in the academic track of secondary school in…

Queensland Academy for Health Sciences (QAHS) is a senior secondary high school offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP). As part of the Diploma, students are required to complete a referenced research essay of four thousand words. For most, this will be their first experience of such a challenging undertaking.…