Background: The need for the adaptation of instruments to other native languages to promote culture-fairness framed this study. Aim: This article reports on the adaptation of the locally developed Emotional Social Screening Tool for School Readiness (E3SR-R) into isiXhosa. Setting: This adaptation study was conducted in South Africa. Methods: The…

This academic article provides the essential steps for designing an effective English questionnaire in social science research, with a focus on ensuring clarity, cultural sensitivity and ethical integrity. Developed from key insights from related studies, it outlines potential practice in questionnaire design, item development and the importance…

Many recent studies emphasize the fundamental importance of stimulating wonder in education, for example, to increase children's intrinsic motivation to learn and their emotional engagement with the lesson contents. Our study advances the research regarding wonder in education in three different ways. First, we present a theoretical framework to…

Based on the concept of action competence, the current study introduces an integrated framework of Professional Action Competence in Education for Sustainable Development (PACesd) described by three defining features: willingness, knowledge of pedagogical approaches, and self-efficacy. To validate this framework, we developed a questionnaire…

Students in higher education are expected to be autonomous and to become co-owners of their learning. In practice, they need support to advance their autonomy, and formal education is assigned an important role in this development. In order to optimally support the advancement of learner autonomy, educators should be able to define, identify and…

The purpose of this study was to compare the validity and reliability of three short physical activity self-report instruments to determine their potential for use with university student populations. The participants (N = 155; 44.5% male; 22.9 ± 5.13 years) wore an accelerometer for 9 consecutive days and completed a single-item measure, the a…

This paper studies the transactional distance between the students and the tutor as well as the autonomy of students in a postgraduate course of the Hellenic Open University (HOU). The aim of the paper is to examine how the relation between autonomy and transactional distance evolves during an academic year and how this relation is affected by…

We re-conceptualized the meaning of scientific literacy and developed an instrument, which we call the Global Scientific Literacy Questionnaire (GSLQ) based on a new conceptual framework for scientific literacy in the twenty-first century. We identified five dimensions, each with key elements. The five dimensions are (1) content knowledge (core…

The last decade has witnessed an increasing research trend on foreign language reading anxiety as a skill related to but distinct from foreign language anxiety. However, sources of foreign language reading anxiety have rarely been investigated. Thus, the current study responds to the study by (Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999) and extends the…

The purpose of the present study was to conduct latent class analysis on the Hyperactivity scale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in order to identify distinct subgroups of subclinical ADHD in a multi-informant framework. We hypothesized a similar structure between teachers and parents, and differences in symptom severity across…

Program and /or course evaluation is a process in which different types of data are collected systematically in order to study the virtues and weaknesses of a language instruction program. Program evaluation is, in fact, one of the essential aspects of any curriculum. It is a kind of quality control in which various aspects of an instructional…

An inadequate number of suitably qualified and experienced supervisors, an increase in the number of students, uncertainty regarding the suitability of supervision and academic rigour in dissertations and theses make it difficult to produce quality graduates within the prescribed time-frame as stipulated by the Department of Education. By…

Cognitive pretesting (CP) is an interview methodology for pretesting the validity of items during the development of self-report instruments. This article reports on the development and evaluation of a systematic method to rate self-report item validity performance utilizing CP interview text data. Five raters were trained in the application of…

This article is the third contribution to a research methods series dedicated to getting good results from survey research. In this series, "good results" is a stenographic term used to define surveys that yield accurate and meaningful information that decision makers can use with confidence when conducting program evaluation and policy assessment…

This article presents the full version of "Views on Science and Education (VOSE)" in both Chinese and English for assessing college students' and adults' views about nature of science and attitudes toward teaching issues in nature of science. The development of VOSE has been delineated in the September issue of "Science Education." The results of…