This study examines three questions about the impact of collaboration during scientific argumentation. First, do groups craft better arguments than individuals? Second, to what degree do individuals adopt and internalize the arguments crafted by their group? Third, do individuals who work in groups learn more from their experiences than…

Low teacher self-efficacy is an important factor constraining the teaching of science at the elementary level. This study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of particular sources of efficacy information for enhancing the science teaching self-efficacy of practicing elementary teachers. Twelve teachers participated in an intervention…

Objective: Historical and current athletic training education literature rarely references any educational theory or instructional model. This article reviews research related to mastery learning and athletic training educational history. It focuses on the possibility that mastery learning was the implicit foundational instructional model of…

This study set out to examine the relationships between the classroom social environment, motivation, engagement and achievement of a group of early entrant Honors students at a large urban university. Prior research on the classroom environment, motivation, engagement and high ability students was examined, leading to the assumption that the…

Given that students cheat so infrequently in elementary school and yet by high school cheat so routinely, the question arises, "What happens to students during the middle school years?" The conditions that lead to such drastic change in student behavior may be tied to a number of environmental factors evident as students advance to higher…

This qualitative study investigated the achievement goal orientations of a group of all male pre-med students attending a small, urban undergraduate college. Semi-structured interviews examined under what circumstances students adopted extrinsic goals, mastery goals, or a mixture of the two. Findings indicated that while nearly all students…

This article reports research that examines the impact of fidelity to a scripted program in two third-grade classrooms. The data was drawn from a study conducted in an elementary school functioning under pressure from state and district policy to increase student standardized reading test scores. Thematic analysis was used to analyze observation…

Intelligent tutors have become increasingly accurate at detecting whether a student knows a skill, or knowledge component (KC), at a given time. However, current student models do not tell us exactly at which point a KC is learned. In this paper, we present a machine-learned model that assesses the probability that a student learned a KC at a…

The Personalised System of Instruction is a form of mastery learning which, though it has been proven to be educationally effective, has never seriously challenged the dominant lecture-tutorial teaching method in higher education and has largely fallen into disuse. An information and communications technology assisted version of the Personalised…

This study compares the impact of an active teaching approach and a traditional (or passive) teaching style on student cognitive outcomes. Across two sections of an introductory business course, one class was taught in an active or nontraditional manner, with a variety of active learning exercises. The second class was taught in a passive or…

Students' native language is a valuable resource in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. Use of native languages may increase a student's sense of efficacy for learning English by: (a) facilitating vocabulary acquisition, (b) aiding learners in comprehension, (c) encouraging self-regulation, (d) making routines and explanations clear…

Student motivation during adolescence has become an increasingly important issue for educators and researchers. Using a goal theory perspective, researchers have investigated a range of goals (including achievement goals, social goals and future goals) that influence students' desire to achieve at school. The present study examines the range of…

The authors conducted a correlational study to investigate the relations among seventh-grade Turkish students' cheating behavior, academic self-efficacy beliefs, usage of self-handicapping strategies, personal goal orientations, and classroom goal structures specific to the science domain. The Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales was administered…

The aim of the present study was to identify dominant goal orientation patterns in university students, define their motivational profiles and their reading strategy use. The results of cluster analysis showed that four groups of students could be differentiated according to their goal orientation: mastery, mastery-performance,…

Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…