Background: Although there is an increasing recognition of the importance of critical thinking in science education across the world, the relevant research literature is extremely thin. There is an urgent need to generate more empirical evidence. Purpose: We examined two essential issues concerning critical thinking (the relationship between…

Background/Context: Students, classrooms, teachers, and schools form hierarchical units of any schooling system that compete for, say, educational resources and sometimes blame one another for the failure to meet a certain societal goal. Little educational research exists that separates competing effects on schooling outcomes across these…

Using data from the 2011 (Chinese) Student Academic Achievement Evaluation, we examined whether within-school socioeconomic gaps in science achievement exist across science subjects, how consistent they are, and whether there are relationships between school average science achievement and within-school socioeconomic gaps in science achievement.…