International comparisons help us explore the assumptions made about U.S. schools, students, and pedagogy. That is why the author decided to spend five months in the Czech Republic teaching science education courses at Palacky and Ostrava Universities and learning about the Czech education system. As a result, the new context challenged his…

Assessment is an integral and vital part of teaching and learning, providing feedback on progress through the assessment period to both learners and teachers. However, if test items are flawed because of misconceptions held by the question setter, then such test items are invalid as assessment tools. Moreover, such flawed items are also likely to…

This paper reports findings on the changes in students' understandings of the concept of matter during an academic year, for students from grade 3 through high school chemistry. The instrument for measuring students' understandings of matter consists of three forms: one for grades 3-6, one for grades 7-9, and one for grades 10-12. The three forms…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) examine whether or not the construction of concept maps by students improves their achievement and ability to solve higher order questions in chemistry, (2) investigate the differential effect of the treatment by gender and achievement level, and (3) explore the relationships between performance on concept…

Our experience suggests that pre-service primary school teachers have problems with learning science, especially chemistry, and that this negative attitude towards science influences their future teaching. On that premise, the purpose of the study was to determine the level of the pre-service primary school teachers' intrinsic motivation for…

Recent economic research has investigated the extent to which involvement in school-sponsored clubs and sports constitutes human capital investment. Through instrumental variables, the existing literature focuses on identifying long-term impacts in terms of educational attainment and wages. Instead, I use a fixed effects strategy to test whether…

This document describes a database of information for those who want to learn more about current efforts to redesign assessment to match changing goals for students and instruction. The database contains descriptive information on alternative assessments in science and mathematics that cover all grade levels, levels of assessment (classroom to…

This document is one of a series developed by the American Federation of Teachers to help fill a chasm in knowledge regarding world wide educational goals. It is intended that this document serve as a resource to anyone involved in setting or evaluating academic standards for students, whether at the national, state, local or school level. This…

This is the final test for students in the sixth-grade science course offered in the Alberta (Canada) schools. Both English and French versions of the test are provided. Intended for administration during June 1986, it contains 60 multiple-choice questions. One hour is allowed for completing the test. An answer key is not included. (ML)

Some aspects of the relationships among the symbolic representations (Rs) of problems given to students to solve, the Rs that students use to solve problems, and the accuracy of the solutions were studied. Focus was on determining: the mental Rs that students used while solving problems, the kinds of translation that takes place, the accuracy of…

The booklet is part of a series which tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. A series of diagrams of a biological community over a period of 10 years indicates an increasing bird mortality, and students are asked to choose a puzzling event that they would want to investigate if they were biologists. A scrambled programed text…

This booklet is part of a series that tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. Students are presented with several possible experiments to investigate one of the explanations for the changes in bird populations illustrated in Booklet A (SE 011 334). A separate series of data interpretation questions is presented for each…

This booklet is part of a series which tests some skills which biologists use in their investigations. It contains a series of questions related to possible experiments testing one of the possibilities offered in Booklet A (SE 011 336) to account for the "unusual event" shown in a series of pictures of a bird interacting with members of its own…

The booklet is part of a series which tests some skills biologists use in their investigations. A series of drawings of the inhabitants of two fictional villages, and a number of extracts of literature concerning congenital malformations, introduce the first question in this test, which asks students to identify an unusual event shown in the…

This booklet is part of a series which tests some skills used by biologists in their investigations. Students are asked a series of questions about one possible explanation of the "puzzling event" concerning human deformities presented in Booklet A (SE 011 338) and directed to a set of questions on data interpretation. The particular questions…