Understanding how situational features of assessment tasks impact reasoning is important for many educational pursuits, notably the selection of curricular examples to illustrate phenomena, the design of formative and summative assessment items, and determination of whether instruction has fostered the development of abstract schemas divorced from…

In an experimental study (N = 209), the authors compared the effects of exposure to typical middle-school written science content when presented in the context of the scientific discovery narrative and when presented in a more traditional nonnarrative format on 7th and 8th grade students in the United States. The development of texts was…

Vocabulary knowledge is a salient factor influencing success both in and out of school. The specialized vocabulary knowledge in science represents the concept-laden hooks on which learning is hung and enables students to build prior knowledge through the expansion of these conceptual hooks. We have identified four levels of learners--struggling…

A recent survey of undergraduates at five schools across the United States indicates that many undergraduates feel that they have learned more about volcanic systems from Hollywood films and the popular media than they learned in the course of their precollegiate formal education. Scores on the Volcanic Concept Survey, an instrument designed to…

This study reports findings from a 10-day professional development institute on curricular trends involving 19 secondary mathematics and science teachers and administrators from Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Philippines, the United States, and People's Republic of China. Participants explored the roles of culture, place, and…