This paper argues that all research should be based on humanistic pedagogies with educational functions. While conducting research associated with issues of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), researchers should pay attention to whether the samples have also been well educated. This study emphasizes that when focusing on significances of…

Background: High school and college students demonstrate a verbal, or textual, advantage whereby beginning algebra problems in story format are easier to solve than matched equations (Koedinger & Nathan, 2004). Adding diagrams to the stories may further facilitate solution (Hembree, 1992; Koedinger & Terao, 2002). However, diagrams may not…

When validating assessment models built with data mining, generalization is typically tested at the student-level, where models are tested on new students. This approach, though, may fail to find cases where model performance suffers if other aspects of those cases relevant to prediction are not well represented. We explore this here by testing if…

The authors developed a demonstration with two similar setups that provide students with both the prior experience to form an expectation and the discrepancy to grab their attention. They follow the demonstration with a structured exploration format that gives students a method for experimenting to find the one built-in difference (i.e., the…

Chia seeds will sprout on almost any moist surface, and they respond quickly to experimental variables. Furthermore, the newly recognized nutritional value and rich cultural history of chia seeds offer the possibility of highly motivating and educational interdisciplinary extensions, especially appropriate to students in the middle grades.…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) support students in learning a complex problem-solving skill. One feature that makes an ITS architecturally complex, and hard to build, is support for strategy freedom, that is, the ability to let students pursue multiple solution strategies within a given problem. But does greater freedom mean that students…

Being told procedures and concepts before problem solving can inadvertently undermine the learning of deep structures in physics. If students do not learn the underlying structure of physical phenomena, they will exhibit poor transfer. Two studies on teaching physics to adolescents compared the effects of "telling" students before and after…

Previous research indicates that academic emotions are largely organized along domain-specific lines. In the present study (N = 1,687; Grades 8/11), the authors explored the domain specificity of academic emotions in terms of the moderating influence of having the same versus a different course instructor across domains. The authors evaluated…

Education policymakers have shown increased interest in incentive programs for teachers based on the outcomes of their students. This article examines a program in which bonuses were awarded to teams of middle school teachers based on their collective contribution to student test score gains. The study employs a randomized controlled trial to…

We present a method for assessing science inquiry performance, specifically for the inquiry skill of designing and conducting experiments, using educational data mining on students' log data from online microworlds in the Inq-ITS system (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System; www.inq-its.org). In our approach, we use a 2-step process: First we use…

Hands-on activities are one of the most popular instructional tools that enhance student understandings of the science concepts and enable them to get involved in science practices as well. However, most of science educators underestimate its effectiveness in the classrooms. In order to illustrate how these activities could be utilized for science…

The present research was conducted with 518 students enrolled at the 6th, 7th and 8th classes of primary schools. A likert-type scale developed by Tuan, Chin and Shieh (2005) and translated into Turkish by Yilmaz and Cavas (2007) was used to examine the motivation levels of students towards science learning. Research findings revealed that gender,…

In this paper we explored whether engaging in two inquiry skills associated with data collection, designing controlled experiments and testing stated hypotheses, within microworlds for one physical science domain (density) impacted the acquisition of inquiry skills in another domain (phase change). To do so, we leveraged educational data mining…

When recalling key term definitions from class materials, students may recall entirely incorrect definitions, yet will often claim that these commission errors are entirely correct; that is, they are overconfident in the quality of their recall responses. We investigated whether this overconfidence could be reduced by providing various standards…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…