The paper presents the results of a study based on a training program for in-service mathematics teachers, targeting to improve their skills of problem posing and qualitative appreciation of problems. During this training program, we found an improvement in participating teachers' availability to discuss and analyse math problems, but also…

In this study, we examine the effect of background knowledge and local cohesion on learning from texts. The study is based on construction-integration model. Participants were 176 undergraduate students who read a Computer Science text. Half of the participants read a text of maximum local cohesion and the other a text of minimum local cohesion.…

The current study evaluates guessing behaviors in a vocabulary size test (VST) and examines whether including an "I don't know" in a VST may have an impact on the results of the test. One-hundred-fifty first-year students at a university in China took part in the study. They were randomly assigned to three groups. Each group took a…

This study explored undergraduate students' understanding of the chemistry topic of thermodynamics using a 4-tier diagnostic instrument, comprising 30 questions, and follow-up interviews. An additional objective of the study was to assess the utility of the 4-tier instrument for use in studies on alternative conceptions (ACs) as there has been no…

Learning progressions represent a set of skills or pieces of knowledge ordered sequentially from least to most complex. This sequence can guide instruction as well as assessment content. This paper describes several useful methods for validating learning progressions including validating the relationship between the progression and student…

This study compared an expert-based cognitive model of domain mastery with student-based cognitive models of task performance for Integrated Algebra. Interpretations of student test results are limited by experts' hypotheses of how students interact with the items. In reality, the cognitive processes that students use to solve each item may be…

This study sampled the current state of technological literacy in Rhode Island high schools using a new instrument, the Technological Literacy Assessment, which was developed for this study. Gender inequalities in technological literacy were discovered, and possible causes and solutions are presented. This study suggests possible next steps for…

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training tutors in content knowledge of a particular domain versus training them in tutoring skills of pedagogical knowledge when tutoring on a complex tutee task. Forty-seven tutor--tutee pairs of fourth-year secondary school students were created and assigned to one of the two treatments.…

It can be argued that very important changes have been made to textbooks which were rearranged according to the theory of constructivism during the 2004-2005 academic year. The aim of this change was to enable students to acquire high-order cognitive skills. In this study, by using Bloom taxonomy, the pre-reading and reflection (assessment)…

Background: Misconceptions are major obstacles to learning physics, and the concepts of heat and temperature are some of the common misconceptions that are encountered in daily life. Therefore, it is important to develop valid and reliable tools to determine students' misconceptions about basic thermodynamics concepts. Three-tier tests are…

We report results of two studies on metacognitive accuracy with undergraduate education students. Participating students were asked to judge their personal performance in a multiple-choice exam as well as to state their confidence in their performance judgement (second-order judgement [SOJ]). In each study, we compared four conditions that…

Some individual difference factors are more strongly correlated with performance on postreading questions when the text is not available than when it is. The present study explores if similar interactions occur with bridging skill, which refers to a reader's propensity to establish connections between explicit text during reading. Undergraduates…

The effectiveness of different teaching methods of collocational expressions in ESL/EFL contexts of education has been a point of debate for more than two decades, with some believing in explicit and the others in implicit instruction of collocations. In this regard, the present study aimed at finding about which kind of instruction is more…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of an instructional intervention on enhancement the pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) science process skills (SPSs) and to identify problems in using SPSs through Laboratory Applications in Science Education-I course (LASE-I). One group pretest-posttest pre-experimental design was employed. An…

In this study the authors set out to better understand the relationship between teacher knowledge of science and student learning. The authors administered identical multiple-choice assessment items both to teachers of middle school physical science and to their students throughout the school year. The authors found that teachers who have strong…