Little research in physics education focuses on graduate student experiences related to structural elements of their programs. This departmental case study examines the impact and perceptions of written qualifying exams (QEs) from a student perspective, following recent research which questions the role and utility of such exams. We conducted…

Students experience many difficulties learning the fundamental relationships in Newtonian mechanics, partly due to preexisting mental models that originate from their everyday lives. These preconceptions often persist even after instruction in mechanics and lead to a supposed incompatibility between physics lessons in school and personal…

This study examines the effects of monologic and dialogic task sequences on incidental vocabulary learning among 115 students in four intact classes of a Chinese vocational high school. Twenty vocabulary items including words, phrases and fixed expressions ranging from high to low frequency levels were targeted. Students were required to complete…

How government delivers public services can have broad societal effects, beyond the impact on programmatic outcomes. Such societal effects are particularly likely in the delivery of public education, as educational concerns drive residential and school choices, and public schools are the second largest public employer in the United States. My…

Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, ambitious math teaching may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-generated inputs and ideas. In this pre-registered…

This article investigates the influence of wealth, a frequently neglected aspect of the economic circumstances of families, on children's development. Using the UK Millennium Cohort Study, it explores whether parental wealth (net total wealth, net housing wealth, net financial wealth, and house value) is associated with children's cognitive…

With the rise of accountability policies since the early nineties, the daily operation of English schools has profoundly changed. Through the in-depth analysis of ability grouping practices in one English secondary school, this paper aims to explore how the accountability shift and datafication impacted the practice of student grouping and…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a specific mathematical learning disability, with a prevalence of around 3%-7% in the school-aged population. It negatively affects individuals, and even the national, development. Previous DD-intervention programs usually targeted on numerosity, number, simple arithmetic, or even general cognitive ability. The…

Research suggests that individual differences in additional language learning may play a more important role in taxing situations when learners are confronted with unfamiliar or difficult tasks. However, studies to date have mostly focused on second language (L2) learners/bilinguals, while individual differences within multilingual populations…

Elementary school mathematics instruction aims to develop children's understanding of both numerical and spatial mathematics--two key areas of mathematical learning. The present study explored how learning within one of these areas may impact the other. Specifically, it investigated whether a measurement-to-number intervention designed to increase…

The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of augmented reality (AR) in an introductory engineering graphics course. The study specifically examined the potential for AR to affect the spatial visualization ability of students and influence student motivation. This study included 50 students from an introductory engineering graphics course…

One of the issues that hinder the students' learning progress is the inability to construct an epistemological explanation of a scientific phenomenon. Four-tier multiple-choice (hereinafter, 4TMC) instrument and Partial-Credit Model were employed to elaborate on the diagnosis process of the aforementioned problem. This study was to develop and…

This study was designed to examine the ability of poor comprehenders to identify, attend, and remember central and peripheral ideas during and after reading. To address these goals, good and poor comprehenders, matched on reading (word decoding) skills and non-verbal intelligence, read three expository texts, while their eye-movements were…

Background: Several studies have revealed that prosody contributes to reading acquisition. However, the relation between awareness of prosodic patterns and different facets of language ability (e.g., vocabulary knowledge) in school-age children remains unclear. This study measured awareness of prosodic patterns using non-speech and speech stimuli.…

Handover between colleagues is a complex task. The problem is that handovers are often inadequate because they are not structured according to theoretically grounded guidelines. Based on the cognitive load theory, we suggest that allowing a clarifying dialogue and thereby optimizing germane cognitive load enhances the information quality and…