Students struggle to acquire the needed energy understanding to meaningfully participate in the energy discourse about socially relevant topics, such as energy transformation or climate change. Identifying students on differing learning trajectories, as well as differences in knowledge used, is essential to help students achieve the needed energy…

Introduction: The present study investigated English-speaking 5-9 year olds' (n = 600, normative sample) comprehension of relative, adverbial and complement clauses using the Test of Complex Syntax-Electronic (TECS-E), an online interactive assessment. with strong test-retest reliability, concurrent validity and internal consistency. Method: Using…

Background/Context: Public monitoring of educational progress and inequality often involves tracking changes in the percentage of "proficient" students across groups and over time. These trends are important signals of state and district provision of educational opportunity. I show how known flaws of this percentage metric, sometimes…

Exploring the relationship between student ability and test-taking effort is an important area of study, offering insights into their approach to educational assessments. Previous research shows this relationship, yet there is a scarcity of research comparing the test-taking effort of students. In addition, researchers have frequently employed…

The current study investigated whether the grade point average (GPA) of high school courses and the score on the test for admission to a bachelor's degree in Psychology--assessing logical reasoning, reading comprehension, and general knowledge--can predict student academic success (AS) and to what extent. Archival data from 5147 candidates (82.4%…

Preparing students for science, technology, and engineering careers is an urgent state policy challenge. We examined the design and roll-out of a science testing requirement for high school graduation in Massachusetts. While science test performance improved over time for all demographic subgroups, we observed rising inequality in failure rates…

This report provides estimates of the lifetime earnings return associated with marginal improvements in attainment at KS2 in England. KS2 assessments take place at the end of primary school, when pupils are aged 10-11. They are a key marker of children's educational progress, and have been a compulsory part of the national curriculum since 1995.…

Although popular educational theories regard ability as being intrinsically multidimensional, academic ability is typically measured with a single, overall score. In this paper, we examine data from the adaptive tutoring system ALEKS to compare three metrics that measure different constructs of mathematical ability that vary in dimensionality. We…

This policy paper examines how much time 15-year-old students dedicate to digital leisure outside of school and explores the relationship between digital leisure and students' learning outcomes and well-being at school. The paper finds that when digital leisure takes place outside school hours, it is only after 4 hours a day that the relationships…

Threshold concepts are transformative elements of domain knowledge that enable those who attain them to engage domain tasks in a more sophisticated way. Existing research tends to focus on the identification of threshold concepts within undergraduate curricula as challenging concepts that prevent attainment of subsequent content until mastered.…

Natural selection is a fundamental scientific process, yet students and educators alike demonstrate misconceptions of the process. Though images are used often in science to facilitate learning, it is less common to assess learners' understanding through their own drawings. This study utilizes a multiple-choice assessment of evolutionary processes…

The Academic Resilience Scale (ARS) was developed to measure resilience factors in educational contexts. However, there is no clarity on whether the scale could be used as a measure of unidimensional academic resilience scores or just to obtain multidimensional academic resilience factors. How a scale is scored can affect the validity of…

Students perceive crossword puzzles as enjoyable. In addition to students' perceptions, crossword puzzles actually improve knowledge retention. However, crossword puzzles increased exam scores for some students but not others. Recommendations have been made for students to create puzzles for their classmates to complete with the rationale that…

While rescription-based therapies are effective treatments for chronic post-trauma nightmares, mechanisms of change have not yet been defined. We examined the relationship between the use of cognitive-related words in nightmare narratives and the posttraumatic cognitions inventory (PTCI) in a sample of 25 trauma-exposed individuals undergoing…

The present study aimed to remediate pre-service teachers' misconceptions about sampling distributions and to develop their conceptual understanding through the use of conceptual change texts (CCTs). The participants consisted of 84 pre-service teachers. To determine the pre-service teachers' conceptual understanding of sampling distributions, an…