In this edition of Assessment News, Charles Darr uses a case study from the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) to highlight how students can benefit from activating deliberate thinking in assessments. The key message underscores the value of using assessment information to generate insights that inform better teaching and…

Achieving the targets of science education mostly depends on the true understanding of the fundamentals where science and the scientific efforts are embedded through the realist ontology and epistemology that science is based on. Models have a special place in science education revealing to understand the nature and status of scientific knowledge.…

Understanding climate change concern among adolescents is considered a useful strategy for building public engagement with climate change. However, the psychological and sociodemographic antecedents of climate change concern have been studied mainly with Western adults. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to gain insights into the factors…

This study is an exploration of how U.S. middle school students interacted with different topics in world history, and how their specific understandings of topics were connected to both sociocultural and instructional contexts. I observed two world history classrooms in a Midwestern Catholic school for 10 months and conducted task-based group…

Research has shown that youth and their communities benefit from civics education, with its aim to prepare citizens for democracy. However, civics education for adolescents in the United States is not equitable, and determining how to best measure aspects of civic development in younger adolescents is a challenge. In this qualitative study, we…

Deliberate practice and having a growth mindset have been hypothesized to increase school performance. But previous studies are few, have been limited to very short interventions, and on average resulted in small effect sizes on school performance. This study compared the attitudes, performance, and behavior of 130 7th-grade students taking part…

Background: Prior research suggests that stereotype threat explains significant portions of school-based achievement gaps (Steele & Aronson, 1995). To combat stereotype threat, several recent school-based field trials have leveraged self-affirmation theory (Steele & Liu, 1983; Liu & Steele, 1986), wherein affirming one's important…

In the current study, we sought to understand relations among the key intervention targets of social-emotional and character development (SECD) interventions: character virtues, Positive Purpose, and social-emotional learning (SEL). Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students (n = 1011, ages 11 to 16, M = 12.94, SD = 1.00) from five urban middle…

Today, the decrease of bonds established with nature due to the use of technology, the increase in urbanization and the change of daily routines might affect people's attitudes and behaviours towards environment negatively. Considering that attitudes are one of the most important factors affecting behaviours, in the current study, it is aimed to…

Academic literature and extensive studies indicate that a small fraction of incoming first-year college or university students have a foundational understanding or appreciation of entrepreneurship. Even fewer have the disposition or inclination to pursue an entrepreneurial path. The purpose of this proposed study is to measure the level of…

An increasing amount of research has indicated that the effectiveness of growth mindset (GM) intervention is sensitive to population characteristics. However, few studies have investigated whether GM interventions can be leveraged to promote academic performance among non-westerners such as Chinese students. Attuning to the Chinese background, we…

In this article we examine the profiling of human rights and children's rights in religious education (RE) and its secular alternative in Finland. We use the term 'worldview education' to describe the combination of these subjects. We analyse what kinds of human rights and ethical issues are raised in Finnish worldview education. One specific…

Anthropogenic climate change caused by the release of excessive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere is the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Man-made climate change threatens the biosphere on which all forms of life depend. Climate change requires human effort to manage the impact of extreme events such as droughts, flooding,…

In 1820 the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism by his famous wire-compass experiment. Ørsted was one of the foremost scientists of the nineteenth century, and he was also one of the leading figures in Denmark in the 19th century with a vital influence in the fields of aesthetics,…

Carol Dweck's Mindset Theory suggests that a teacher who has a growth mindset believes that a student's basic qualities are things you can cultivate through effort. Dweck's theory explains that by applying a growth mindset towards children, they begin to change the way they take on challenges in their education (Dweck, 2006). One way that…