Racial and ethnic achievement gaps contribute to the lack of underrepresented minorities in STEM-related careers. This research is grounded in the expectancy-value model of achievement motivation which posits that motivation is influenced by social-cognitive variables such as self-efficacy and beliefs about the usefulness or utility of the task.…

The question of whether single-sex or co-ed schooling has any impact on students' attitudes toward science is highly contested and warrants research from all corners of the world. This study adds to our current knowledge by investigating different attitudinal indices of Grade 9 science students (N = 356, M[subscript age] = 14.5 years) in…

Building on youth literacies in formal learning spaces is a promising direction for asset-based literacy learning designs. However, in response to ways that academic spaces can deaden passionate literacy study, it is important to attend to the resulting affective flows of such practices. This study traces how affect was sustained and dampened in a…

The purpose of the study is to analyze the affective traits that affect mathematics achievement through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) as a traditional regression model and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS), as one of the data mining methods. Structural Equation Modeling, one of the regression-based methods, is quite popular for…

The disproportionate attrition of female students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is well documented in higher education but less well understood at the secondary level. In a large, public high school in an affluent, highly educated city, the high honors mathematics pathway is the only math pathway that has not yet…

The acquisition of scientific knowledge through problem solving offers the possibility to consider different requirements for inclusive chemistry lessons. The architecture of the "model for inclusive chemistry teaching" (MiC) is designed in a way that teachers can derive concrete, planning-guiding assistance from it. Following this…

In this paper we designed a STEM outreach program with a modular tissue engineering education tool (we refer to as "modular cyclic-stretch device") to engage high school students in STEM hands-on activities. Using simple machines such as gears and rotating cams, students were able to build a custom device to apply cyclic stretch to…

Student grades and motivational outcomes in introductory physics courses can influence their retention in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines and future career aspirations. In recent years, many research studies have focused on inequities in calculus-based introductory physics courses, e.g., by investigating gender…

The Scholarship Development Program (SDP) was created four years ago to promote scholarly productivity for early career faculty. The SDP consists of professional development sessions, formal mentoring, and small research interest groups, all involving senior faculty members. The components of the SDP allowed for a team-based approach to mentoring.…

The objective of the research is to investigate if certain demographics of students help explain four areas of potential improvements in predominantly short-term study abroad programs. These areas are motivation, experience enhancement, benefits from various learning activities, and students' concerns regarding their experience. Pre-trip and…

Angela Chapman and Allan Feldman (2016) conducted a study that aimed to exam how a group of diverse urban high school students were affected by the participation in a contextually based authentic science experience. The analysis of all data led the authors to conclude that the experience of authentic science positively influenced the science…

Teachers' interest is a key influencing factor in geography class, development of curricula and writing textbooks and only little is known about it. A cross-sectional study along the lines of interest theory originating from educational psychology was carried out in Germany in the summer of 2015, in which 141 teachers at secondary schools…

Although the recent annual growth rate in the U.S. paramedical field has been 4%, Latino and African American men have been significantly underrepresented in the field compared to their proportion in the U.S. population at large. This problem threatens both the quality and quantity of available emergency health care. The purpose of this study was…

Self-efficacy has an important role to strengthen one's belief in completing tasks. This research focused on the lack of self-efficacy in primary school students. The purpose of this research is to describe the potentials and urgency of self-efficacy seen from the perspective of students' self-abilities and interests in the fifth-grade of primary…

According to the seductive detail effect, adding interesting but irrelevant information (i.e., seductive details) can be detrimental to learning success. In this study, it was explored within two experiments whether the valence of text-based seductive details might affect learning outcomes differently. For Experiments 1 and 2, we pretested…