Science teachers in many countries were required to shift from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to distance learning (DL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the aim of helping science teachers learn how to support their students in negotiating such shifts in the future, we used an online motivation survey based on achievement goal theory to…

Globalization is a powerful force with far reaching impacts on education and education policy. The growth of large scale international surveys of student achievement and the increasing role played by intergovernmental agencies in education means that the influence that globalization exerts on education is likely to increase even further in the…

Achievement goal theory distinguishes between mastery goals (the goals of developing competence) and performance goals (the goals of demonstrating competence) [Ames [1992] "Journal of Educational Psychology" 84: 261-271]. In this study, we employed this theory aiming to better understand why adolescents' motivation to learn science…

This is a mix methods follow-up study in which we reconfirm the findings from an earlier study [Vedder-Weiss & Fortus [2011] "Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 48(2)", 199-216]. The findings indicate that adolescents' declining motivation to learn science, which was found in many previous studies [Galton [2009] "Moving to…

There is a growing awareness that science education should center not just on knowledge acquisition but developing the foundation for lifelong learning. However, for intentional learning of science to occur in school, out of school, and after school, there needs to be a motivation to learn science. Prior research had shown that students'…

Describes a study to diagnose grade 8 (n=185) and grade 10 (n=170) Israeli students' difficulties in causal thinking while studying biology. The two main difficulties found are (1) inability to organize events according to their correct temporal sequence and (2) inability to identify an event that had been caused by another event. (MDH)