Students with disabilities are frequently granted accommodations for high-stakes standardized tests to provide them an opportunity to demonstrate their academic knowledge without interference from their disability. One type of possible accommodation, test response format, concerns whether students respond in multiple-choice or constructed-response…

Spatial skills have been shown to be important to success in an engineering curriculum, and some question if poor spatial skills prevent students from entering STEM fields or if students with weak spatial skills avoid engineering disciplines believed to highly spatially-oriented. Veurink and Hamlin (2011) found that freshmen students entering…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a traditional lecture-based curriculum versus a modified "flipped classroom" curriculum of cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal physiology delivered to first-year graduate students. Students in both courses were provided the same notes and recorded lectures. Students in the…

This research study was designed to provide a formal evaluation of the academic achievement of homeschooled students compared to traditionally schooled students attending a Catholic university located in South Florida. In addition, this study offers empirical data for all those interested in the academic success of homeschooled students in higher…

Using Dutch data on pupils in elementary school this paper is the first empirical study to analyze whether assigning homework has a heterogeneous impact on pupil achievement. Addressing potential biases by using a difference-in-difference approach, I find that the test score gap is larger in classes where everybody gets homework than in classes…

The main aim of the study was to examine students' attribution of performance in learning English as a foreign language at Adama town government high schools and see into its pedagogical implications. It aimed at investigating the perceived causes of success and failure of boys and girls. In order to meet the objectives of the study, data were…

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Problem-Solving Strategy Steps (PSSS) on students' achievement, skill, and confidence. The study was conducted in a two-year college classroom with 70 students from two different groups enrolled in a physics course. One of them was randomly selected as an experimental group (EG) and the…

Learning technical computing skills is increasingly important in our technology driven society. However, learning technical skills in information systems (IS) courses can be difficult. More than 20 percent of students in some technical courses may dropout or fail. Unfortunately, little is known about students' perceptions of the difficulty of…

This article explores pre-service and in-service science teachers' perceptions on active learning, and examines the effectiveness of active learning by pre-service science teachers in the Irish second level classroom through a two-phase study. In the first phase, data on perceptions were gathered from final year pre-service teachers and in-service…

Since 2004-05 first year students at the School of Environmental Sciences, Ulster University have engaged with senior student tutors (SSTs) in workshop activities aimed at preparations for their written examinations. Using a pedagogical action research methodology we evaluated the role of SSTs in bridging the experiential learning gap between…

In this study, we investigated why Laotian students had a low score, when they were tested by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). About 400 first year university students answered the FCI or a Lao version of the FCI (LFCI) with the contexts of some questions changed. The students answered a questionnaire and 34 of the students were interviewed. The…

The focus of the current study is to understand which unique features of an immersive virtual reality environment have the potential to improve learning relative motion concepts. Thirty-seven undergraduate students learned relative motion concepts using computer simulation either in immersive virtual environment (IVE) or non-immersive desktop…

This paper reviews the literature on comparing online and paper course evaluations in higher education and provides a case study of a very large randomised trial on the topic. It presents a mixed but generally optimistic picture of online course evaluations with respect to response rates, what they indicate, and how to increase them. The paper…

The Michigan Context and Performance Report Card measures school performance by adjusting standardized test scores to account for student background. Comparing schools using unadjusted test scores ignores the significant relationship between academic performance and student socioeconomic background--a dynamic outside a school's control. The…

In the context of an upper-level psychology course, even when students were given an opportunity to refer to text containing the answers and change their exam responses in order to improve their exam scores, their performance on these questions improved slightly or not at all. Four experiments evaluated competing explanations for the students'…