According to (inter)national policy and curriculum documents, the acquisition of research skills is an important objective of secondary education. However, the conceptualization and hence the operationalization of this concept seems ambiguous. Furthermore, no test exists to assess students' proficiency in (a broad range of) research skills in a…

The galvanic cell is a basic concept in electrochemistry. To assess mainland Chinese students' proficiency levels in galvanic cells, the Galvanic Cell Proficiency Level Assessment (GCPA) was developed based on the Rasch model. The GCPA was developed through a pilot test and consists of seven multiple-choice questions and four open questions. The…

Introduction: Students' perceptions of the assessment tasks can be a basis for optimizing the classroom assessment environment. In an attempt to quantify students' perceptions of assessment, Dorman and Knightley (2006) developed Perceptions of Assessment Tasks Inventory (PATI). This study sought to provide evidence for the construct validity of…

Background: In the last few decades, researchers have turned their attention to students' understanding of scientific concepts at different school levels. The results indicate that the learners have different ideas, and most of them are inaccurate in terms of those generally accepted by the scientific community. Purpose: This study was undertaken…

Educational accountability has grown substantially over the last decade, due in large part to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Accordingly, educational researchers and policymakers are interested in the statistical properties of accountability models used for NCLB, such as status, improvement, and growth models; as well as others that are not…

This research applied evolving conceptions of learning to examine how to represent and evaluate students' and experts' cognitive structures. High school history students completed several tasks. Direct comparisons of the quality of student maps with expert maps showed that experts' concept maps could be used to score students' concept maps…

The purpose of this article is to describe the development, validation and use of the "Constructivist Multimedia Learning Environment Survey" (CMLES). This questionnaire assesses teachers' and students' perceptions of the learning environment when students use online multimedia programs while teachers use constructivism as a referent for…