Context: Many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in educational research compare innovative academic programs to business-as-usual instruction (BAU), with the goal of drawing causal inferences regarding their efficacy. However, the changing landscape of education matched with variations of content standards, teaching approaches, and local…

In representation-rich domains such as organic chemistry, students must be facile and accurate when translating between different 2D representations, such as diagrams. We hypothesized that translating between organic chemistry diagrams would be more accurate when concrete models were used because difficult mental processes could be augmented by…

Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognitive skills results in changes to student metacognition, motivation, learning, and future learning in the classroom. We examined whether a 6-hr intervention designed to teach the declarative and procedural components of planning, monitoring, and…