Teachers lack effective curriculum-based instruments to assess their students' scientific competence that would provide information for modifying their inquiry instruction. The main purpose of this study was to develop and validate a Curriculum-Based Scientific Competence (CBSC) test to assess students' scientific competence in a 1-semester Grade…

Surveying is a common methodology in science education research, including cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons. The literature surrounding students' attitudes toward science, in particular, illustrates the prevalence of efforts to translate instruments with the eventual goal of comparing groups. This paper utilizes survey data from a…

Competitions are discussed as a measure to foster students' interest, especially for highly gifted and talented students. In the current study, participants of a cognitive school competition in science were compared to non-participants of the same age group (14-15) who either did not participate in any competition or who participated in a…

Communication skills are one of the most important competencies for 21st century global citizens. Our guiding presupposition was that socioscientific issues (SSIs) could be used as an effective pedagogical tool for promoting students' communication skills by increasing peer interactions, stimulating students' reasoning, and in constructing shared…

Several researches in physics education have demonstrated the problematic status of teaching the subject of gravitation and weight and students' knowledge of these concepts. This paper presents findings of a study of students' knowledge following instruction within a changed conceptual framework of the weight concept in several 9th grade classes…

In this study, the effect of 3 cognitive variables such as logical thinking, field dependence/field independence, and convergent/divergent thinking on some specific students' answers related to the particulate nature of matter was investigated by means of probabilistic models. Besides recording and tabulating the students' responses, a combination…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of students' motivational beliefs (learning goal orientation, task value and self-efficacy) in science learning on students' self-regulation in the science classroom. The study also examines the moderating effect of gender on the proposed relationships. Data were collected from 719 boys…

Students find science relevant to society, but they do not find school science interesting. This survey study analyzes Finnish grade 9 students' actual experiences with science teaching methods and their preferences for how they would like to study science. The survey data were collected from 3,626 grade 9 students (1,772 girls and 1,832 boys)…

This study concerns the question of how teachers can help pupils to perceive the concept of weight (gravitation). Fifth and ninth graders were asked in a paper-and-pencil test to compare the weight of two objects suspended in a pulley-in-balance half a year after the learning intervention consisting of three successive pulley-in-balance…

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) was the foundation for this study that explored the effect of science text and image integration on grade 9 students' reading comprehension. Two texts in Chinese on the moon phase with different print and image integration were compared--a traditional textbook (TT) used in Taiwanese junior high schools and a…

Research on conceptual change is still a powerful framework for empirical investigations on students' learning of science. During recent years, an increasing body of research has explored students' concepts prior and subsequent to instruction, leading to an extensive documentation of students' concepts including the difficulties and opportunities…

In this study, the Turkish students' understanding level of electric circuits consisting of two bulbs and one battery was investigated by using open-ended questions. Two-hundred fifty students, whose ages range from 11 to 22, were chosen from five different groups at primary, secondary and university levels in Trabzon in Turkey. In analyzing…