National goals and performance standards were introduced in Sweden during the 1990s as part of a curriculum reform. The intention was to detect shortcomings among students and provide support to those students who did not reach the passing grade in one (or several) subject/s. Despite this reform, approximately one-fourth of the students do not…

The importance of attitudes and other variables of the affective domain in education is acknowledged for a long time. In this study, we used an attitude questionnaire to survey 498 Portuguese 9th-grade students to determine the predictive ability of the attitudes towards the discipline of Physics-chemistry on school achievement. Possible gender…

Many studies in science education acknowledge the positive effects of context-based learning on students' interest and attitudes. However, little is known about the design criteria of contextual situations generating these effects and how facets of students' situational interest are affected while learning in a contextualised setting. This paper…

This paper presents findings from a two-phase mixed methods study investigating the phenomenological structure of self-relevance among ninth-grade junior high school biology students (Phase 1: N = 118; Phase 2: N = 139). We begin with a phenomenological multidimensional definition of self-relevance as comprising three dimensions: the academic…

The aim of this study was to develop a Likert type attitude scale for high school students with regard to high school physics lessons. The research was carried out with high school students who were studying in Ankara. First, the opinions of 105 high school students about physics lessons were obtained and then 55 scale items were determined from…

Much research has been conducted to investigate the effects of inquiry-based learning on students' attitude towards science and future involvement in the science field, but few of them conducted in-depth studies including young learners' socio-cognitive background to explore mechanisms which explain how inquiry experiences influence on career…

In this study, structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to an instrument assessing students' understanding of the particulate nature of matter, the collective properties and physical changes, such as melting, evaporation, boiling and condensation. The structural relationships among particular groups of items were investigated. In addition,…

The expectancy-value model of motivation states that individuals' choice, persistence and performances are related to their beliefs about how much they value task. Despite the importance of "task value" in learning biology, lack of the instruments on task value for high school biology courses for practical use indicated requirement to…

This research is distinctive in that a mixed-methods approach, employing both cogenerative dialogues and student responses from the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES), was used to help to understand 9th grade urban students' experiences in their biochemistry class in New York City. Factor analyses of student responses demonstrated…

While participating in single- and mixed-gender science and mathematics classes, ninth-grade urban high school students' (n = 118) academic self-concept, self-efficacy, and school climate perceptions were examined. Their perceptions were measured quantitatively from the Fennema-Sherman Mathematics (modified for Science) Attitude and the Patterns…

The students' performance in various types of problems dealing with the conservation of matter during chemical reactions has been investigated at different levels of schooling. The participants were 499 ninth grade (ages 14, 15 years) and 624 eleventh grade (ages 16, 17 years) Greek students. Data was collected using a written questionnaire…

How to make learning more interesting is a basic challenge for school education. In this Finnish study, the international ROSE questionnaire was used to survey, during spring of 2003, the relationship between interest in biology and out-of-school experiences for 3626 ninth-grade pupils. Interest and experience factors were extracted by using the…