Facilitating students' acquisition of higherorder thinking skills is imperative in the 21st century. Although some types of text have been shown to enhance higherorder thinking, the effects of many novel forms of text have yet to be investigated. As such, the purpose of the present study was to explore the extent to which a relatively novel form…

Despite difficulties understanding the dynamics of complex systems only simple dynamical systems without feedback connections have been taught in secondary school physics. Consequently, students do not have opportunities to develop intuition of temporal development of systems, whose dynamics are conditioned by the influence of feedback processes.…

Teachers are ideally placed to identify and refer pupils who self-injure, but are often unaware when pupils self-injure or unsure how to respond. The aims of this study were to explore and compare pre-service and in-service teachers' knowledge and attitudes towards self-injury, and their confidence responding to pupils who self-injure. Pre-service…

Psychological research on learning has brought forth many insights that are relevant for teachers (for example, knowledge about learning strategies). However, teachers sometimes have intuitive fragmentary knowledge that is partly incorrect. Such knowledge hinders the acquisition of psychological knowledge. Tried-and-tested interventions dealing…

Given the growing emphasis on internationalization and the requisite intercultural skills and temperament necessary in a global society, this study examines the relationship between precollege engagement and entering dispositions on a developmentally based set of global perspective outcomes. Based on a multi-institutional sample of 3,131 entering,…

Comics are popular with adolescents because of their features of humor, narrative, and visual imagery. The purposes of this study were to examine the learning outcomes and emotional perceptions of reading a science comic book and a science text booklet for students of different levels of achievement, and to explore the main factors of the two…

Even though science says genetically modified (GM) foods are safe, many consumers remain skeptical of the technology. Additionally, the scientific community has trouble communicating to the public, causing consumers to make uninformed decisions. The Millennial Generation will have more buying power than any other generation before them, and more…

This study examined the effects of professional development in the form of a teacher study group and a particular discussion approach, Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) upon teachers' questioning and students' levels of thinking during discussion of text. The study explored how five middle school teachers achieved a deeper…

As part of an effort to improve students' knowledge of constellations and bright stars in an introductory level descriptive astronomy survey course, we measured the baseline knowledge that students bring to the class and how their score evolve over the course of the semester. This baseline is needed by the broader astronomy education research…

The goal of the current study is to explore the influence of knowledge on socioeconomic discrepancies in word learning and comprehension. After establishing socioeconomic differences in background knowledge (Study 1), the authors presented children with a storybook that incorporates this knowledge (Study 2). Results indicated that middle-income…

Computers have taken an important place in the training of science students and in the professional life of scientists. It is often taken for granted that most students have mastered basic Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) skills; however, it has been shown that not all students are equally proficient in this regard. Starting from…

Background: Density is difficult to learn and teach in middle schools. This study, hypothesizing that the density concept develops as part of a conceptual system, used a conceptual change approach to teaching density. The approach emphasized the use of multiple strategies to teach the density concept and the associated concepts in the conceptual…

The assessment of university students' economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students' economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings…

Knowing what skills underlie college success can allow students, teachers, and universities to identify and to help at-risk students. One skill that may underlie success across a variety of subject areas is structure building, the ability to create mental representations of narratives (Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990). We tested if…

Chemistry courses remain a challenge for many undergraduate students. In particular, first-semester organic chemistry has been labeled as a gatekeeper with high attrition rates, especially among students of color. Our study examines a key factor related to conceptual understanding in science and predictive of course outcomes-knowledge structures.…