The misunderstandings related to thermodynamics (including chemical equilibrium) and chemical kinetics of first and second year Hungarian students of chemistry, environmental science, biology and pharmacy were investigated. We demonstrated that Hungarian university students have similar misunderstandings in physical chemistry to those reported in…

Teacher's conceptions are important as they could have a strong influence on their professional practices. This study set out to explore Fijian teacher's conceptions of assessment. Seventy teachers enrolled in an assessment course at a university in Fiji were involved in this study. Data was collected by asking teachers to write a reflection on…

This paper reports how the context in which a mathematics item is embedded impacts on students' performance. The performance of Year 10 students on four PISA items was compared with performance on variants with more familiar contexts. Performance was not better when they solved items with more familiar contexts but there was some evidence that…

Ascertaining levels of media competence (development in the field of media culture) of students is based on the classification of indicators developed by the author. In accordance with this classification, audience is invited to a basic blocks of questions and tasks. The targets are: to detect the levels of motivational indicators of audience's…

Based on PISA 2009 data, this article studies the relationship between students' computer use and their achievement in reading, mathematics and science in 23 countries. After having categorised computer use into a set of different activities according to the skills they involve, we correlate students' PISA test-scores with an index capturing the…

It has often been suggested that actual or anticipated final grades may influence the ratings given by students in student experience surveys but few studies have been able to test this using actual grades. A study was carried out involving six courses over all four year levels of an undergraduate engineering programme, where students were asked…

This report is based on the assessment of ICT (information and communication technology) literacy conducted in October 2005. It describes the development of a computer-based tool for assessing ICT literacy among school students and the application of that tool with a nationally representative sample of approximately 7,400 students from Years 6 and…