This study aims to reveal the effects of out-of-class learning activities conducted in the school garden on students' interest in science and their scientific attitudes. Research designed as a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design of quantitative research methods. The research group of the study consists of 37, 7th grade…

There is growing evidence that science capital (science-related forms of social and cultural capital) and family habitus (dispositions for science) influence STEM career decisions by youth. This study presents reliability and validity evidence for a survey of factors that influence career aspirations in science. Psychometric properties of the…

Previous studies show that girls have a lower scientific self-concept than boys. Since interest starts declining over the course of lower secondary school, this exacerbates the issue that fewer girls aspire to choose a scientific profession. In this article, we present the concept of scientific profile classes. Profile classes pursue the goal of…

Scholars report that the students' interest in STEM declines and suggest to approach them earlier. This case study with the convenient sample of seven primary school students investigates the students' view of science and scientists and examine the following research questions in the Dutch lower secondary school context: (1) What are young…

This article analyses the representation of femininity in school textbooks in search of elements that discourage girls from taking up scientific educational paths. Quantitative content analysis and elements of the constant comparison method were used to examine the content of 75 Polish textbooks. Significant differences were identified in the…

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…

Interest research offers different hypotheses about the association between interest and learning outcomes. The standard hypothesis proposes that interest predicts learning outcomes: people acquire new knowledge about a topic they find interesting. The affective by-product hypothesis assumes that learning predicts interest: by learning something,…

Motivation for an action is determined by the expectation for success and subjective judgment on task values according to the expectancy-value theory. Task values, including intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value, and cost, influence and predict the students' engagement in learning activities and their choices in the future. This study…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop an attitude scale to find out middle school students' (grades 5 through 8) attitudes towards science and to investigate the effects of grade level on students' attitudes towards science. Research Method: Cross-sectional survey method was used in this study. The attitude towards the science scale developed by…

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…

One of the objectives of comparative education research is to compare within a certain period of time educational systems that have developed in similar or different environments and processes. The aim of this qualitative study is to compare the value education in Turkish and Iranian seventh-grade social studies textbooks. Data were collected…

Historically, final course grades of sixth- through eighth-grade language arts, mathematics, and eighth grade science students at the primary research site, Site A (pseudonym), suggest a high degree of grade inflation or disassociation when grade point averages (GPA) were compared to actual student performance levels as measured by annual state…

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.…

Grounded in theory and best-practices research, this practical text provides teachers with 40 strategies for using fiction and non-fiction trade books to teach in five key content areas: language arts and reading, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts. Each strategy provides everything a teacher needs to get started: a classroom…

This brief first describes individual interventions that CREATE researchers tested in middle school science, social studies, and language arts classrooms with English language learners over the course of the 2005-2009 school years. The brief then explains how the SIOP Model was used as a professional development framework to unite the separate…