Background: Educational and developmental psychologists often examine how groups change over time. Two analytic procedures -- analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and the gain score model -- each seem well suited for the simplest situation, with just two groups and two time points. They can produce different results, what is known as Lord's paradox.…

Emphasis is growing on the use and form of doctoral acknowledgements, which are often viewed as sites of gratitude. Research has not addressed whether examiners are influenced by doctoral acknowledgements. We explore whether examiners read or do not read the acknowledgements, the reasons for their choice in this regard and whether the…

Unconscious biases can be thought of as the shortcuts the brain takes to make life easier. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman (2011) and Amos Tversky explain that unconscious biases arise because humans have two thinking systems: a fast, automatic (unconscious) system and a slower more deliberative (conscious) system. The first system can be thought of…

Increasingly, educators in the biological and social sciences teach about the concept of race from a social constructionist perspective. Scholarship on race pedagogy suggests that to fully appreciate the complexity of race, students must be able to both deconstruct multiple false beliefs about the fixed nature of race (i.e., racial essentialism)…

Connectives can facilitate the processing of discourse relations by helping comprehenders to infer the intended coherence relation holding between two text spans. Previous experimental studies have focused on pairs of connectives that are very different from one another to be able to compare and formalize the distinguishing effects of these…

Validity, reliability, and fairness are three prominent indicators for evaluating the quality of assessment processes. Each of the indicators is most often written about and applied in the context of large-scale assessment. As a result, the technical properties of these indicators make them limited in both their practicality and relevance for…

The central aim of this paper is to explore a kind of rationality that seeks to do justice to educational practice: to our understanding of its complexities and to its actual conduct. The enquiry begins with a review of the limits of standardising procedures, including their inbuilt technicist bias, which are increasingly dominant in educational…

The article identifies three narratives about mathematics education. The first claims that mathematics is a wonderful subject, which provides a true foundation for human knowledge and progress. The second presents mathematics as a suspicious subject, which serves functions of oppression. The third highlights that mathematics has critical…

In this article, the authors challenge the ongoing dehumanization of people of color by arguing for the use of Black texts as core readings in courses on adult learning rather than as add-ons or "special topics."

The purpose of this report is to support the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) in building the capacity of local educational agencies and schools in the identification of resources and tools that can be used by instructional teams to evaluate and assess bias in curricular materials. The materials reviewed provide insights into critical…

Background: A better understanding of departmental climate and its relationship to engineering identity is needed to diversify engineering and improve marginalized students' experiences. Purpose/Hypothesis: We investigated whether undergraduate engineering students from 16 social identity groups perceived departmental climate differently from one…

We propose genetic social psychology as a theoretical framework to render intelligible both the suppression of the expression of prejudice and prejudice reduction in childhood. In particular, we explore the role of positive in-group norms in prejudice reduction in childhood and adolescence and their interplay with realistic and symbolic threats…

Scientific misinformation and disinformation, proliferating via the internet and social media, are now significant problems. Proposed solutions vary substantially. Here, I describe a set of prospective benchmarks--10 competencies--that seem essential for reorienting science education to address the challenge. They include, first, elements of…

Background: Women and people of color continue to be underrepresented in many STEM fields and careers. Many studies have linked societal biases against the mathematical abilities of women and people of color to this underrepresentation, as well as to earlier measures of mathematical confidence and performance. Recent studies have shown that…

Accurate teacher judgements can enhance pupils' learning about science and technology. This study explored primary school teachers' judgements about their pupils' ability to reconstruct an electrical and a mechanical system. The judgement accuracy of most teachers was poor, gender-biased, and underestimation was more common than overestimation.…