This paper describes the benefits of a psychometric analytic approach when studying students' ability to comprehend texts. A reading comprehension measure consisting of four text passages with 32 questions was developed, and analyses using a mean-based approach and linear logistic test (LLTM) method were performed. According to ANOVA, eighth-grade…

It is important to question the generalizability of the knowledge about the nature of science (NOS), and thus know whether the knowledge about NOS can be transferred to various contexts. As such, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether students were able to transfer their acquired NOS understandings into contexts that vary in their…

The research assessed secondary school students' conceptions of acid-base strengths by using the conceptual change instruction accompanied with concept maps and analogies. These teaching strategies were employed to help them make unfamiliar events familiar. Within a quasi-experimental design, the sample of the study consisted of 73 secondary…

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and…

This study investigated the impact of topic interest, alongside L2 proficiency and gender, on L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading. A repeated-measures design was used with 135 Korean EFL students. Control variables included topic familiarity, prior target-word knowledge, and target-word difficulty (word length, class, and concreteness).…

This study was carried out to reveal whether the attitudes of the geography teachers in Turkey towards the environment change according to different variables, using ''Attitude Scale" for 404 geography teachers working in various high schools throughout the country. The data were analysed by SPSS statistical software. The result revealed…

The authors outline results of 3 studies conducted to examine the structure of disciplinary knowledge from reading measured through proximity data. In Study 1, 168 third-grade students were asked to read a science text and rate the relationships of keywords from the passage. From these ratings, comprehension scores were calculated that related…

This paper presents selected findings from a wider study on the expression of health within physical education (PE) curricula in secondary schools in England and Wales. The study revealed that the expression of health in PE broadly reflected ideologies associated with promoting "fitness for life" and "fitness for performance"…

Based on the schema theory, it has been found that the background knowledge of males and females differs. This difference in background knowledge can affect the students' reading comprehension. In Iran, although boys and girls study in different schools, they follow the same curricula and syllabuses in all the schools. The present article reports…

An investigation of the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension performance on standardized reading tests (the California STAR Test) was conducted with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade ethnic minority children from low-income backgrounds (N = 68). Predictor variables examined included perceived background knowledge…