This paper reports the findings of the second year of a four-year empirical research project. Its aim is to modify 'step-by-step' instructions for practical activities in a way that may enable the development of experimental design skills among junior high school learners. Each school year pupils spend six lessons doing practical activities using…

This paper reports the findings of the second and the third year of a four year longitudinal empirical research into the modification of 'step-by-step' instructions to practical activities which require one or more steps to be designed by the students. This method had been successfully applied for a short period for 14-15 years old students.…

The results of an earlier empirical research study on modifying 'step-by-step' instructions to practical activities requiring one or more steps of the experiments to be designed by students initiated a longitudinal study to investigate the effectiveness of the approach for younger students and over a period of time. The longitudinal study that…

The present paper reports results of a longitudinal research project studying the contribution of cognitive skills and other factors to proficiency in a foreign language (L2) in the Hungarian educational context. The larger project aims to describe the levels of L2 proficiency of school-aged populations in order to explore the conditions and…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

In this article we investigate what characterizes the language learning motivation of Hungarian English language students in terms of Dornyei and Otto's process model of motivation ("Motivation in Action," 1998). We used a mixed-method research design, in which qualitative interviews conducted with 20 students were supplemented with…

The basic question under study was whether, or to what extent, the regular use of a library induces a modification in the user's structure of tastes and activities. In the spring of 1972, detailed interviews were conducted with 400 library users and 200 matched nonusers in two middle sized Hungarian towns. Interviewees were asked to evaluate, on a…