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…

The goal of this article is to frame some new directions to social comparison research in organizational settings. Four themes are developed. First, we examine the role of organizational variables in shaping the basic sub processes in social comparison, such as the selection of referents. The second theme focuses on the meaning of level of…

In a study on L2 proficiency in writing, conducted among 84 Dutch university students of Italian and 75 students of French, manipulation of task complexity led in the complex task to a significant decrease of errors, while at the same time a trend for a lexically more varied text was observed (Kuiken and Vedder 2005, 2007, in press). Based on this…

The structure of the national numeracy strategy (1999) has ensured that whole-class teaching has become a significant feature of the primary mathematics lesson. It is the section of the lesson where children are introduced to new mathematics and therefore there is a need to make it effective. In this article, the author describes her small-scale…

The author examined the potential influence of learning opportunities provided in 1 U.S. and 1 Chinese mathematics textbook series on students' problem-solving performance. Also, the author studied learning opportunities provided in the textbooks by analyzing word problem distribution across various problem types, as well as the potential…

Teachers of physiology at all postsecondary levels were asked to participate in a survey about the possible sources of students' difficulty in learning physiology. Sixty-three physiology teachers responded to the 18-question survey; 35 of the respondents also responded to a request for written comments about this issue prior to taking the survey.…

Across Canada there is increased attention to the important relationship between the quality of learning environments--particularly effective teaching--and student achievement. "What did you do in school today?" proposes a multi-dimensional framework of student engagement as a core idea for improving the quality of teaching and learning…

This study explored the perceptions of 304 teacher education students regarding how effectively and meaningfully their instructors use the "Microsoft PowerPoint" presentation software program in their teaching and compared graduate and undergraduate students' perceptions to determine the extent to which graduate and undergraduate teacher educators…

Instructional strategies make a difference in whether students are engaged in learning and are profiting from their time in class. High schools, technology centers and middle grades schools are encouraging teachers to adopt new teaching techniques and are providing opportunities for teachers to work together to improve their instructional skills…

To explore whether different balances of fiction/non-fiction reading and challenge might help explain differences in reading achievement between genders, data on 45,670 pupils who independently read over 3 million books were analysed. Moderate (rather than high or low) levels of challenge were positively associated with achievement gain, but…

When individuals are given tests that are too hard or too easy, the resulting scores are likely to be poor estimates of their performance. To get valid and accurate test scores that provide meaningful results, one should use functional-level testing (FLT). FLT is the practice of administering to an individual a version of a test with a difficulty…

Hierarchical Bayes procedures for the two-parameter logistic item response model were compared for estimating item parameters. Simulated data sets were analyzed using two different Bayes estimation procedures, the two-stage hierarchical Bayes estimation (HB2) and the marginal Bayesian with known hyperparameters (MB), and marginal maximum…

Item response theory (IRT) is based on the assumption that a direct relationship exists between an examinee's total performance on a set of items and the difficulty of each item on the test. The Rasch model represents this relationship mathematically on an equal interval scale. This paper argues that IRT, under the required conditions, provides…

A rating scale can be expressed as a chain of dichotomous items. The relationship between the dichotomies depends on the manner in which the rating scale is presented to the test taker. Three models for ordered scales are discussed. In the success model, which represents growth, the lowest or easiest category is presented first. If the test taker…