Every sphere of life has been revolutionised by science. Thus, science understanding is an increasingly precious resource throughout the world. Despite the widely recognised need for better science education, the percentage of school students studying science is particularly low, and the numbers of students pursuing science continue to decline…

Motivation research has shown significant relations of students' mastery goal orientation and perceived competence to educational outcomes, but has not simultaneously scrutinized their relative influences on various educational outcomes. In the present investigation, a sample of Australian students from 6 secondary schools in Western Sydney…

Teacher education must ensure that teachers have the prerequisites to meet different demands in their career entry phase. The presented evaluation study of 241 student teachers in their second semester of pre-service education shows that not only highly rated courses have an impact on the learning outcome of student teachers; the intensity with…

Currently there is a need for measures to examine the issue of sustaining students' enrolment intentions over an extended period of study in physics, a subject which is generally perceived as hard and demanding by students. This paper addresses this gap in research by describing the development and the assessment of psychometric properties of…

Conscious allocation of cognitive resources to task-relevant thoughts is necessary for learning. However, task-irrelevant thoughts often associated with fear of failure can enter the mind and interfere with learning. Effects like this prompt the question of whether or not learners consciously shift their cognitive resources from task-relevant to…

A significant body of literature attests to the influence of social contexts on students' engagement with school. A review of this literature led to the construction of a self-report instrument designed to measure Social-Relational Support for Education (SRSE). The conceptual framework underlying the SRSE instrument focuses on the factors…

We examined goal importance, focusing on high, but not exclusive priority goals, in the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to predict students' academic performance. At the beginning of semester, students in a psychology subject (N = 197) completed TPB and goal importance items for achieving a high grade. Regression analyses revealed partial…

This study uses the Rasch model technique to examine the dimensionality structure and differential item functioning of the Arabic version of the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children (PPASC). A sample of 220 Omani fourth graders (120 males and 100 females) responded to an Arabic translated version of the PPASC. Data on students'…

The present study examined characteristics of students who took advantage of the opportunity to learn Algebra II from a highly skilled teacher. In particular, student information was gathered concerning: (a) the amount of mathematics students knew prior to the class, (b) their motivation for learning mathematics, (c) the number and types of…

Information processing theory suggests that sublexical fluency skills are important to word reading development, but there are few supportive data. This study investigated if sublexical fluency (letter name fluency, letter sound fluency, and phoneme segmentation fluency) contributed to the development of word reading and spelling in 92…

Troubleshooting in a practice situation requires two types of information, namely for reasoning about the problem-cause and for finding an adequate solution ("declarative information") and for manipulating the environment ("procedural information"). It is hypothesized that presenting this information piece-by-piece during practice (i.e.,…

Learner-generated drawing is a strategy that can improve learning from expository text. In this paper, a model of drawing construction is proposed and the experimental design tests hypotheses derived from this model. Fourth and sixth grade participants used drawing under three experimental conditions with two conditions including varying degrees…

Sound symbolism is the notion that the relation between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather there is a subset of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. This research investigates sound symbolism as a possible means of gaining semantic knowledge of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of Bandura's (1997) hypothesized sources of self-efficacy on the academic and self-regulatory efficacy beliefs of entering middle school students ("N" = 263) and to explore whether these sources differ as a function of gender, reading ability, and race/ethnicity. For the full sample, mastery…

College students learned about science with a multimedia program. One group (choice or C) chose to learn with or without an animated pedagogical agent (APA) representing a male or female of five different ethnicities. Another group (no-choice or NC) was assigned an APA by the system. All participants in C group chose to learn with APAs and…