In the United States, science education has experienced substantial shifts in the last decade. For in-service teachers, professional development programs (PDPs) play an important role in reform success. Despite well-known core features of effective PDPs, research still suggests a range of results among programs that claim to use those features. An…

The study presented in the paper has the following goals. The first is to review and compare teacher competence frameworks developed in Eastern (Chinese) and Western (German) contexts, exemplified for the domain of mathematics. Major similarities of the two contexts could be reconstructed in the conceptualization of teacher competence as a…

This study adapts "Change Fatigue Scale" into Turkish cultural context for potential uses in future empirical studies. It also aims to validate it for educational organizations, so the items were revised accordingly. There were three different study groups in the study. The first group included 33 English teachers and there were 150…

In the US K-12 public school settings, each state's annual English language proficiency (ELP) assessment, as part of an educational accountability system, has tremendous impact on English learner (EL) students' academic paths and success. It is thus critical to establish a robust validation framework and empirical evidence to ensure that states'…

Purpose: Catering for learner diversity is a key issue in the recent educational reforms in Hong Kong. The present study addresses this issue through an investigation of the relationships between students' learning styles and approaches to learning in Hong Kong secondary schools. Design/Approach/Methods: A total of 6,054 junior secondary students…

This article describes the development and validation of a six-scale survey to assess school climate in terms of students' perceptions of the degree to which they feel welcome and connected, together with a scale to assess students' perceptions of bullying. The development of each survey involved a multi-stage approach, including: 1) an extensive…

Reform is a common tool used by policymakers to increase student achievement. Unfortunately, reform efforts are not always successful. However, researchers have demonstrated that school culture and climate both impact student achievement (Cavanaugh & Dellar, 1997; Cohen, Fege, & Pickeral, 2009; D' Alessandro & Sadh, 1998; MacNeil,…

The authors of this article review the development and discuss potential uses for a new instrument that evolved from follow-up research conducted after completion of a five-year study of innovative curricular and instructional practices. The instrument is A Stakeholder's Perceptions of Innovative Reform Efforts (ASPIRE). The primary purpose of…

Previous research has shown that interest in and concern about environmental issues tends to decrease in adolescence, but less is known about adolescents' broader consciousness of sustainable development, also including economic and social issues. This study investigates students' sustainability consciousness in the transition to adolescence. This…

The inevitable responses to high stakes testing, wherein students' test scores are highly consequential for teachers and administrators, include cheating, excessive test preparation, changes in test scoring and other forms of gaming to ensure that test scores appear high. Over the last decade this has been demonstrated convincingly in the USA, but…

Problem Statement: Scientists support that success cannot be achieved through schools with a bureaucratic structure in which top-down relation is emphasized but rather with a decentralized structure of authority. Scientists also posit that participative management is the best approach. Participation or participative leadership is defined as…

The study aims to gain a better understanding of the national large-scale curriculum process in terms of the used implementation strategies, the function of the reform, and the curriculum coherence perceived by the stakeholders accountable in constructing the national core curriculum in Finland. A large body of school reform literature has shown…

In this paper, the Classroom Learning Activities Checklist (CLAC) is proposed as a classroom observation measure that effectively captures the classroom environments and strategies that support self-regulation via task-oriented learning in young students. The CLAC's dimensionality, reliability, and concurrent and predictive validity evidence are…

Life sciences faculty agree that developing scientific literacy is an integral part of undergraduate education and report that they teach these skills. However, few measures of scientific literacy are available to assess students' proficiency in using scientific literacy skills to solve scenarios in and beyond the undergraduate biology classroom.…

This study examines the development and implementation of a survey-based instrument assessing the effectiveness of a course redesign initiative focused on student centeredness at a large midwestern university in the United States. Given the scope of the reform initiative under investigation in this study, researchers developed an instrument called…