Modern knowledge-based societies, especially their younger members, have largely lost their bonds to farming. However, learning about agriculture and its interrelations with environmental issues may be facilitated by students' individual interests in agriculture. To date, an adequate instrument to investigate agricultural interests has been…

Previous research has identified various factors that contribute to readers' comprehension of expository texts, including strategy expertise, language proficiency, prior knowledge, and more recently, readers' beliefs about knowledge. This study addresses the need to understand the relative contributions of these predictors to readers'…

Learners encounter science in a wide variety of contexts beyond the science classroom which collectively could be quite influential on student attitudes and abilities. But relatively little is known about the relative influence of different forms of informal science experiences, especially for the kinds of experiences that students typically…