Chemistry is considered a difficult subject by most students. Its difficulty lies in Chemistry's complex and abstract nature. This highly abstract nature requires constant interplay and coordination between the macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic representations. Experts can successfully navigate the various representations without overloading…

The pervasive use of information and computer technology in second or foreign language learning has led researchers to explore the ideal tasks for technological environments to facilitate second language (L2) learning. This study intended to contribute new knowledge to this area by examining the effects of the task complexity manipulated along the…

With many universities now admitting students into their science programs with little or no prior knowledge of the relevant field, significant challenges arise in the way these fields are introduced. Challenges mount with various preconceived ideas regarding the levels of difficulty, thus necessitating introductory concepts be presented in…

General chemistry II is often a challenging course for first-year STEM students, and many students rely on partial credit to achieve success in the course. However, assigning liberal partial credit to students' work can also disincentivize developing proficiency with the material. Here, we present an alternative specifications-based grading scheme…

Narratives skills are associated with long-term academic and social benefits. While students with disabilities often struggle to produce complete and complex narratives, it remains unclear which aspects of narrative language are most indicative of disability. In this study, we examined the association between a variety of narrative contents and…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine a reliable and efficient set of acoustic parameters of the human voice able to estimate individuals' mental load level. Implementing detection methods and real-time analysis of mental load is a major challenge for monitoring and enhancing human task performance, especially during high-risk activities…

The three accuracy ranges for oral reading--easy, instructional level, and hard--are familiar to almost everyone who teaches young students just learning to read. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that no study has yet been conducted with beginning readers to support our well-accepted views about accuracy ranges and their role in reading…

A new diagnostic instrument, the Conceptual Survey on Wave Optics (CSWO), was developed and validated on 224 high school students (aged 18-19 years) in Croatia. The process of test construction, which included the testing of 61 items on the total of 712 students is presented. The final version of the test consists of 26 multiple-choice items which…

This study investigated the effects of retrieval practice on the cognitive and metacognitive learning outcome in a psychology lecture at university. In a within-subjects design, N = 180 students completed an intermediate knowledge test in the 9th session and a final test in the 13th session of the semester. Both tests assessed students'…

Recently, researchers have expressed their growing concern over the scrutiny of language test items in light of cognitive load theory (CLT). While cognitive load has been central to language learning research, it has not enjoyed due attention in high-stakes language tests. The current study set out to delve into the relationship between difficulty…

The Everyday Discrimination Scale is the most commonly used instrument to assess discrimination. The survey asks respondents about a range of negative interpersonal experiences and then asks them to provide a single main reason for all these experiences. Theories of intersectionality cast doubt on the idea that marginalized individuals generally…

The paper explores curriculum design and drivers of ethics in universities and the professional accounting bodies in Ghana. Data were collected through individual face-to-face interviews. The study revealed that ethics in the curricula of universities and professional bodies are integrated within and across subjects and within all levels of…

The purpose of this study was to construct a higher-order thinking test of science for pre-service elementary school teachers. The test was created using the ADDIE model. The analysis stage was carried out by identifying the needs and baseline of higher-order thinking skills of students from the department of primary School Teacher education in…

Background: Research shows distributed practice enhances learning and skill development, but less is known about the effect on perceptions and attitudes toward the material being learned. Objective: This study examined whether distributed practice could improve performance and attitudes in statistics, a subject that students report finding…

Background: Problem-solving is a multidimensional and dynamic process that requires and interlinks cognitive, metacognitive, and affective dimensions of learning. However, current approaches practiced in computing education research (CER) are not sufficient to capture information beyond the basic programming process data (i.e., IDE-log data).…