Educators and policymakers have set a goal that all students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. A substantial body of research supports the idea that the path to college and career readiness begins well before middle and high school. In an earlier policy report, ACT examined the percentage of academically far off track…

Assessments of U.S. students typically reveal stronger performance in science than mathematics yet their science performance remains uninspiring at best. Whether the metric considered is an international benchmark from TIMSS or PISA or the nation's NAEP report card, the mediocre portrait of U.S. science achievement has remained virtually unchanged…

Growing Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics (STEM) talent Washington MESA--Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement--helps under-represented community college students excel in school and ultimately earn STEM bachelor's degrees. MESA has two key programs: one for K-12 students, and the other for community and technical college…

The aim of this study is to investigate the grades 4 to 8 students' attitudes towards science under the "liking school", "independent investigator" and "what I really think of science" titles. The affect of gender, grade level and science achievement on students' attitudes was analysed in "liking school",…

This work presents the evaluation and refinement of a chemistry attitude measure, Attitude toward the Subject of Chemistry Inventory (ASCI), for college students. The original 20-item and revised 8-item versions of ASCI (V1 and V2) were administered to different samples. The evaluation for ASCI had two main foci: reliability and validity. This…

This study compared the educational effects of computer simulations developed in a hyper-realistic virtual environment with the educational effects of either traditional schematic simulations or a traditional optics laboratory. The virtual environment was constructed on the basis of Java applets complemented with a photorealistic visual output.…

An examination of gender, social class and ethnicity performance and participation patterns in different UK countries shows that inequities occur in relation to gender, class and ethnicity but that the patterns of inequity look quite different in the three domains. Achievement is equal for different genders but many more males take mathematics…

Research showed that children's school-entry academic skills are strong predictors of their later achievement, thereby highlighting the importance of children's achievement at kindergarten entry. This article defines a particular type of parental involvement in children's education and uses a representative sample of American urban kindergarteners…

"Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as a self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group" (C. M. Steele & Aronson, 1995, p. 797). A stereotype threat effect then is described as the detrimental impact on a person's performance or achievement measurements when they are placed in a stereotype threat environment. For…

The 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment focussed on students' scientific competencies, measured their knowledge and provided questionnaires focussed on different aspects of life. One aspect was students' experience with information and communication technology (ICT). A secondary analysis of variance of the Czech Republic data (N =…

The earliest national accountability tests occur at the fourth-grade level and the outcomes are aggregated. This national study exposes the depth of science education inequities a full year earlier by disaggregating third graders' demographic data with the science performance. A full 3-way ANOVA model was applied to test the 3 main effects…

The article builds upon a study where students' relations to science are related to their worldviews and the kind of worldviews they associate with science. The aim of the study is to deepen our knowledge of how worldview and students' ways to handle conflicts between their own worldview and the worldview they associate with science, can add to…

Background: The association between frequent use of certain instructional practices in mathematics and science and learning outcomes in schools in low-, medium-, and high-achieving countries is the focus of this study. It not only looks at teaching practices "that work" (positively associated with achievement) but whether they…

Assessment of learning plays a dominant role in formal education in the forms of determining features of curriculum that are emphasized, pedagogic methods that teachers use with their students, and parents' and employers' understanding of how well students have performed. A common perception is that fair assessment applies the same mode of…

We investigated the effect of instructional analogies in interaction with logical thinking ability on achievement and attitude towards chemistry. The participants were 147 female students from 6 8th grade classes in three public junior high schools selected by using a random multistage sampling method from five education districts in Tabriz, a…