Background: Many students enter into postsecondary education without the preparation to face the demands of postsecondary coursework in science. Increasingly, policymakers and educational researchers are responding to calls for reforming secondary education to provide more opportunity for all students to receive high-quality education and to…

Background: We adopted a theoretical framework that the acquisition of a scientific concept comprises the development of connections among conceptual elements associated with a scientific term within a mental semantic network. Given this framework, the hypothesis that the surrounding words connected with a scientific term are relevant to the…

Schools often have to decide between extending the length of the school year or the school day. This paper examines the effects of changes in the distribution of instructional time on eighth-grade student achievement through a methodological framework that disaggregates total yearly instructional time into separate inputs for days per year and…

In this article, we discuss the development and the administration of a multiple-choice test, which we named "Test of Calculus and Vectors in Mathematics and Physics" (TCV-MP), aimed at comparing students' ability to answer questions on derivatives, integrals, and vectors in a purely mathematical context and in the context of physics.…

Calls for assessments incorporating representations beyond the symbolic level (e.g., chemical reactions and formulas) have encouraged assessment designers to choose from a variety of representations in the design of chemistry assessments. This work expands on prior work in considering how representations are incorporated within assessments. First,…

Learners need to possess scientific literacy in order to be able to analyze and explain scientific concepts and solve daily life problems. The current study aimed to analyze the potential of the Socio-Science Spirituality learning model to improve the scientific literacy of students at the junior high school level. The sample of this research…

The vast extent to which quantitative prerequisites vary among post-secondary geoscience programs often presents a challenge for educators and students alike in courses for which math and physics are foundational. This study discusses the design of GEOAppS, a suite of educational numerical models, and its application toward lowering the…

This study focuses on the relationship between students' early academic skills and academic achievement. In this context, it is aimed to examine the predictors of students' early literacy and numeracy skills on their later math and science achievements across countries. A quantitative research approach using a correlational survey design was…

This article claims to provide evidence on whether content-subject and cognitive achievement vary in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and non-CLIL classrooms in the framework of a newly introduced CLIL programme in Italy. A standardized and validated science test (TIMSS) was administered to a sample 988 fourth-grade students. The…

Student learning in simple electric circuits has been extensively studied, which has revealed a large number of persistent misunderstandings. This study applies the conceptual framework model to investigate student difficulties in the knowledge integration perspective. The results are used to guide the design of a concept test that targets the…

Science teacher's self-efficacy has been at the center of many investigations on students' achievement in science, teacher burnout, and teacher performance. While overly studied, this construct has not been examined with scientific literacy in depth. Thus, this study aims to identify the influence of science teacher's scientific literacy on their…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research.] Students taking a second astronomy course for nonscientists were asked to reflect on the nature of scientific inquiry three times during the first half of the semester. First, they were assigned a short paper in which they were asked to argue for or against the thesis…

The scope this article was to develop an instrument to measure Chemistry students' ability regarding 'physical bonding' and to validate it. A number of 24 items were developed by mapping items to cognitive levels described by the Marzano taxonomy. A number of N=73 students were evaluated. Four items exhibited a MNSQ >1.3 and were eliminated…

The Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provide that an intermediate-level science test is to be administered in Grade 8 to serve as a basis for determining students' need for academic intervention services in science. The New York State Grade 8 Intermediate-Level Science Test consists of two required components: a Written Test and a…

Genetics as a core concept of life science is essential for understanding biology. Examining genetics understanding among biology majors is becoming important since they must necessarily achieve some level of genetics understanding to advance their career. This study compares Indonesian biology majors' genetics understanding with previously…