A simple inquiry-based activity called "Fruit Puzzle" was designed to investigate high school students' understanding of the relationship between the concepts of density and solution concentration at a submicroscopic level. The first activity allowed students to predict whether five types of fruit would sink or float in water and asked…

This small-scale field experiment tests whether an adapted values-affirmation intervention enhances youths' academic achievement and mitigates social identity threat while simultaneously raising capacity to promote social change via the development of "critical consciousness" (CC). CC is the critical analysis of inequitable social…

This research aimed to determine whether implementation of virtual technology or implementation of physical materials in a learning environment is more efficient in understanding physics concepts and developing positive attitudes at the high school level. The theory that framed this study is the model of learning as dynamic transfer. Participants…

Based on a teaching intervention with modelling activities involving experimental work in 9th grade classes, the goal of this study is to find out how students estimate the credibility a modelling task setting when it integrates a hands-on experimental approach. The theoretical background is based on the concept of authenticity and its long…

Empirical studies have revealed that teachers face problems when assessing task difficulty for their students. By drawing on research that focuses on how individuals assess what others know, we argue that these difficulties are a consequence of the imputation of one's own knowledge to others (i.e., social projection). In particular, we tested the…

This study investigated whether German learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) acquire additional recoding strategies that they do not need for recoding in the consistent German orthography. Based on the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) we expected students with little experience in EFL to use the same…

In this study, the effect of group work and traditional method on 9th grade students' misconceptions about Newton Laws was investigated. The study was conducted in three classes in an Anatolian Vocational High School in Ankara/Turkey in the second term of the 2014-2015 academic year. Two of these classes were chosen as the experimental group and…

The use of grades to motivate constitutes an unresolved theoretical controversy. In 2 experiments carried out with different age groups and academic tracks, a standard-grade condition was compared with a condition in which differential scoring engendered higher grades and with a no-grade condition. The relative power of task performance and task…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the effects of "mastery learning" and "student team learning" on the math achievement of high school students. The analysis included 588 ninth-grade students in 16 urban Philadelphia high schools. The study assessed the effectiveness of the different conditions after one year by…

One of the main tenets of the mental model theory is that when individuals reason, they think about possibilities. According to this theory, reasoning on what is possible from the truth of a sentence would be psychologically basic, whereas reasoning the other way round, on the truth or falsity of a sentence from a given state of affairs, would…

Several researchers have investigated the effects of computer simulations on students' learning. However, few have focused on how simulations with authentic contexts influences students' inquiry skills. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, we developed a computer simulation (FossilSim) embedded in an authentic inquiry lesson. FossilSim…

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…

Many of the skills and talents required to be a successful scientist, such as analysis, experimentation, and creativity, can be developed and reinforced through art. Both science and art challenge students to make observations, experiment with different techniques, and use both traditional and nontraditional methods to express their ideas. The…

This study aimed to explore the effects of marking and metacognition-evaluated feedback (MEF) in computer-based testing (CBT) on student performance and review behavior. Marking is a strategy, in which students place a question mark next to a test item to indicate an uncertain answer. The MEF provided students with feedback on test results…

This article provides an instructional approach to helping students generate open-inquiry research questions, which the authors call the "open-inquiry question template." This template was created based on their experience teaching high school science and preservice university methods courses. To help teachers implement this template, they…