This study investigated changes in middle school students' interest and affect during a moderately difficult reading task. The aim was to explore how changes in interest (topic and situational) and affect were related to students' reading fluency throughout the task and perceived difficulty. Interest and affect were recorded at four time points:…

Plausibility is a central but under-examined topic in conceptual change research. Climate change is an important socio-scientific topic; however, many view human-induced climate change as implausible. When learning about climate change, students need to make plausibility judgments but they may not be sufficiently critical or reflective. The…

Evidence for cognitive benefits of simulated versus physical experiments is unclear. Seventh grade participants (n = 147) reported their understanding of two simple pendulum problems (1) before conducting an experiment, (2) immediately following experimentation, and (3) after a 12-week delay. "Problem type" was manipulated within…

The current study investigated the mediating role of social achievement goals in the relation between classroom goal structures and academic engagement and social adjustment among 373 middle school students (52.8% female). Students' perceptions of classroom goal structures were measured in Fall; social achievement goals and academic and social…

Fostering lifelong learning (LLL) is a topic of high relevance for current educational policy. School lays the cornerstone for the key components of LLL, specifically persistent motivation to learn and self-regulated learning behavior. The present study investigated the impact of classroom instruction variables on concrete determinants for these…

It was hypothesized that students' value orientations are connected to their experience of motivational interference in a conflict between a school- and a leisure-related activity as well as to school marks as indicators of learning outcomes. In a self-report study with Italian adolescents (N = 433; M = 14.5 years) using a school-leisure conflict…

This study investigated the relations between teachers' pedagogical beliefs and students' self-reported engagement in learning from texts with instructional pictures. Participants were the biology, geography, and German teachers of 46 classes (Grades 5-8) and their students. Teachers' instructional behaviors and students' engagement in learning…

The capacity to solve tasks that contain high concentrations of visual-spatial information, including graphs, maps and diagrams, is becoming increasingly important in educational contexts as well as everyday life. This research examined gender differences in the performance of students solving graphics tasks from the Graphical Languages in…

The present study regarded the self-regulated vs. not-self-regulated function and the indirect vs. direct (i.e., polite vs. impolite) linguistic form of middle school students' requests for help. Natural data (149 requests were sent via an online homework-help forum by French-speaking seventh to ninth graders) was used. Nearly 60% of the requests…

This study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional program (schema-based instruction, SBI) designed to teach 7th graders how to comprehend and solve proportion problems involving ratios/rates, scale drawings, and percents. The SBI program emphasized the underlying mathematical structure of problems via schematic diagrams, focused on a…

This study examined a new achievement-goal approach to teacher motivation by testing the predictions that mastery and ability-avoidance goals for teaching would predict students' reports of teacher support for and inhibition of question asking and help seeking, as well as students' help seeking and cheating. Surveys were completed by 53 teachers…

An experiment is reported that investigated the development of students' understanding of the numerical value of fractions. A total of 200 students ranging in age from 10 to 16 years were tested using a questionnaire that required them to decide on the smallest/biggest fraction, to order a set of given fractions and to justify their responses.…

Improving teacher quality in P-12 mathematics is a national need, and many universities and schools are working to address it. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), twelve math and science institutes across the country are helping P-12 teachers strengthen their capacity to support students' learning. These NSF Institutes…

The purpose of this paper is to examine how mathematically talented children in a disadvantaged rural community experience mathematics, both as a discipline and as a school subject. The aim is to find answers to questions such as: "What do these children think mathematics is?" "What value do they attach to the study of mathematics?" and "In what…

This essay is a reflection on several aspects related to my encounters with the concept of reform in mathematics education. I start with an exploration of the question of what is reform, grounded on my work with teachers in a project aimed at promoting reform. I focus on two aspects that seem to be present in most approaches to reform--group…