Stability and change in students' achievement goals (AGs) are of great relevance for educational research and practice. In two separate meta-analyses, we investigated the rank-order stability (93 studies, 569 effect sizes, 54,736 students), as well as the mean-level change (157 studies, 1,170 effect sizes, 81,464 students) in AGs throughout…

One-hundred and twenty-two undergraduates completed a survey assessing beliefs that WM is a stable trait, or that it is quality that can be improved with skill training. They then read an authentic set of journal articles in a special issue, which discussed whether a program called CogMed is or is not effective in promoting WM functioning.…

Predictive power of many behavioral measures relies on high test-retest reliability, whereby a measure yields similar data when repeated measure administration occurs at spaced-out intervals. However, major environmental disruptions between measure administration may impact test-retest reliability. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused…

Plausibility perceptions about climate change influence learner engagement, motivation, and knowledge acquisition, thereby shaping the effectiveness of climate change education. The Plausibility Perception Measure (PPM) was originally developed following the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. There…

Undergraduate research (UR) is a vetted educational tool that is commonly perceived to prepare students for entering graduate school and careers in STEM fields; however, scholarly attention to date has largely relied on self-report data, which may limit inferences about the causal effects on student outcomes. In light of this, recent calls have…

One of the universal responses to tackling global climate change is teaching climate change concepts at all levels of formal education. This response requires, among other things, teachers who are fully literate about climate change science, so that they can explain the concepts underlying the causes, impacts and solutions of climate change as…

This study, based in Taiwan, aims to explore what psychological factors influence imagination stimulation of education major students, and what the relationship is between these factors and imagination. Both principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were employed to determine the most appropriate structure of the developed…

We examined stability and change in students' achievement goal orientations over varying tasks. Two naturalistic longitudinal studies were conducted in undergraduate courses. Students completed self-reports designed to measure their achievement goals. Achievement goals were measured four times: prior to two assignments and two exams. Four…

Value added has emerged as a hot-button topic in the assessment literature, due in large part to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Value added, as conceptualized by Astin (1985), reflects talent development, "changes in the student from the beginning to the end of an educational program. These changes can cover a wide range of…

The writer calls attention to the many traps associated with one of the most frequent uses of assessment: the technical difficulties of measuring changes in learning over time. Noting that psychometricians don't like "change" or "difference" scores in statistical analyses because they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures…