Science education reform efforts have emphasized the incorporation of more authentic and meaningful scientific practices into formal learning environments. With this focus on practices, such as scientific modeling, a powerful tool for sense-making and reasoning, comes a need to observe and understand if and how it is actually occurring,…

Recently Burkholder "et al." argued that class normalized gains over the entire population of courses is approximated by a Cauchy distribution, not by a normal distribution, and therefore should not be used to compare different classes because means and standard deviations cannot be calculated. They argued that multiple linear regression…

A large scale survey reveals that the performance of the Indian preuniversity students in internationally standardized physics tests is intermediate to the American and the Chinese but reveals a disturbing bimodality. Scientific reasoning skills, however, are similar to both. The bimodality in physics tests corresponds to two different educational…

Ishimoto, Davenport, and Wittmann have previously reported analyses of data from student responses to the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), in which they used item response curves (IRCs) to make claims about American and Japanese students' relative likelihood to choose certain incorrect responses to some questions. We have used an…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study that measures trends in mathematics and science achievement at the 4th and 8th grades every 4 years. TIMSS is designed to align broadly with mathematics and science curricula in the participating education systems and, therefore, to reflect…

Educational opportunities in the home, at school, and within the community differ across countries and affect students' achievement and future success in science fields. Bandura's Social (Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory, 1986) and Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System Theory (Ecological models of human development.…

Countries around the world are striving to improve their educational systems with a view to improving their economy and society. In this global competition, national and international test results are of considerable interest. In this paper, we show that national testing in England and the USA have shown little or no improvement over the years.…

The aim of this study was to cross-culturally investigate the instructional efficacy of the Common Knowledge Construction Model (CKCM) with college students learning about "factors affecting solubility" focusing on students' conceptual understanding, attitudes and scientific habits of mind. Even though the CKCM is a decade old, there has…

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative…

Asian culture has been test-centric for over 1,400 years. U.S. education has been since the 1990s. Based on Kim's creative Climates, Attitudes, and Thinking skills (CATs), creativity indicators were developed using the 2015 PISA questionnaires. Study I examined: (1) relationships between students' PISA science scores and CATs; (2) differences…

The Trend in International Mathematics and Science Study reveals how the math and science achievement of students in participating countries compares with that of their international peers. Since 1995, the results have been surprising and disappointing for some countries. Astonished and disappointed by such outcomes, scholars and educational…

Understanding how situational features of assessment tasks impact reasoning is important for many educational pursuits, notably the selection of curricular examples to illustrate phenomena, the design of formative and summative assessment items, and determination of whether instruction has fostered the development of abstract schemas divorced from…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 is the sixth administration of this international comparative study since 1995 when first administered. TIMSS is used to compare over time the mathematics and science knowledge and skills of fourth- and eighth-graders. TIMSS is designed to align broadly with mathematics and…

In physics education research (PER), concept inventories (CIs) have become standard instruments for assessing students' learning throughout instruction. To promote widespread use of concept inventories, previous studies have developed an approach to split a full length CI into short versions of CIs. This research extends the existing method to…

This report describes ACT test results for Austin Independent School District (AISD) seniors in the 2018-2019 school year. In 2018-2019, the district's average ACT composite score of 23.0 exceeded the state (20.5) and national (20.7) average composite scores.