The pressure to have students perform well on standardized tests can serve as a stressor to some teachers in their efforts to autonomously teach their students, particularly those of low socioeconomic status (SES). However, the relationship between teachers' sense of autonomy, teachers' attitudes and behaviors, SES, and student's academic success…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between constructivist learning environment and students'motivation to learn science by testing whether students' self-efficacy in learning science, intrinsically and extrinsically motivated science learning increase and students' anxiety about science assessment decreases when more…

Science education in China is Subject Matter Knowledge (SMK) oriented in that SMK understanding is the major benchmark to assess students' achievement in science learning. Such an orientation causes students to overemphasize the memorization of SMK and neglect other indispensable components of science, such as scientific attitudes and research…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore and describe the relationship between middle-level science curriculum structure and student science literacy. Although national and state science curriculum standards are based on an integrated model, there is little quantitative data supporting integration. This study explored the use of…

As the breadth and depth of economic reforms increase in China, growing attention is being paid to equalities in opportunities to learn science by students of various backgrounds. In early 2009, the Chinese Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology jointly sponsored a national survey of urban eighth-grade students' science…

This study investigated the relationship between readability of 73 text-only multiple-choice questions from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 and performance of two groups of South African learners: those with limited English-language proficiency (learners attending African schools) and those with better…