A cross-cultural examination of the psychometric properties of responses to the Achievement Goal Questionnaire

The psychometric properties of scores from the Achievement Goal Questionnaire were examined in samples of Japanese (N = 326) and Canadian (N = 307) post secondary students. Previous research found evidence of a four-factor structure of achievement goals in U.S. samples. Using confirmatory factor-analytic techniques, the authors found strong evidence for the four-factor structure of achievement goals in both the Canadian and Japanese populations. Subsequent multi group structural equation modeling indicated the metric invariance of this four-factor structure across the two populations.

Meteorology and climate inspire secondary school students

As part of its National Science and Engineering Week activities in 2009 and 2010, the University of Reading organised two open days for 60 local key stage 4 pupils. The theme of both open days was ‘How do we predict weather and climate?’ Making use of the students’ familiarity with weather and climate, several concepts of relevance to secondary science were investigated. The open days also provided an opportunity for more than 30 research staff from the university to interact with the students. Feedback from students and teachers was extremely positive. This article shows how meteorological science can be used to illustrate elements of the secondary science and mathematics curricula.

Secondary school students’ epistemic insight into the relationships between science and religion – a preliminary enquiry

A number of previous studies have shown that there is a widespread view among young people that science and religion are opposed. In this paper, we suggest that it requires a significant level of what can be termed ‘epistemic insight’ to access the idea that some people see science and religion as compatible while others do not. To explore this further, we draw on previous work to devise a methodology to discover students’ thinking about apparent contradictions between scientific and religious explanations of the origins of the universe. In our discussion of the findings, we highlight that students’ epistemic insight in this context does seem in many cases to be limited and we outline some of the issues emerging from the study that seem to boost or limit students’ progress in this area.

The accuracy of students' predictions of their GCSE grades

The paper reports a study that investigated the relationship between students’ self-predicted and actual General Certificate of Secondary Education results in order to establish the extent of over- and under-prediction and whether this varies by subject and across genders and socio-economic groupings. It also considered the relationship between actual and predicted attainment and attitudes towards going to university. The sample consisted of 109 young people in two schools being followed up from an earlier study. Just over 50% of predictions were accurate and students were much more likely to over-predict than to under-predict. Most errors of prediction were only one grade out and may reflect examination unreliability as well as student misperceptions. Girls were slightly less likely than boys to over-predict but there were no differences associated with social background. Higher levels of attainment, both actual and predicted, were strongly associated with positive attitudes to university. Differences between predictions and results are likely to reflect examination errors as well as pupil errors. There is no evidence that students from more advantaged social backgrounds over-estimate themselves compared with other students, although boys over-estimate themselves compared with girls.

Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really 'bad language learners’?

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).

Secondary school teachers' perspectives on teaching about topics that bridge science and religion

The question of where to locate teaching about the relationships between science and religion has produced a long-running debate. Currently, Science and Religious Education (RE) are statutory subjects in England and are taught in secondary schools by different teachers. This paper reports on an interview study in which 16 teachers gave their perceptions of their roles and responsibilities when teaching topics that bridge science and religion and the extent to which they collaborated with teachers in the other subject area. We found that in this sample, teachers reported very little collaboration between the curriculum areas. Although the science curriculum makes no mention of religion, all the science teachers said that their approaches to such topics were affected by their recognition that some pupils hold religious beliefs. All the RE teachers reported struggling to ensure students know of a range of views about how science and religion relate. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for curriculum design and teacher training.

How students view the boundaries between their science and religious education concerning the origins of life and the universe

Internationally in secondary schools, lessons are typically taught by subject specialists, raising the question of how to accommodate teaching which bridges the sciences and humanities. This is the first study to look at how students make sense of the teaching they receive in two subjects (science and religious education) when one subject’s curriculum explicitly refers to cross-disciplinary study and the other does not. Interviews with 61 students in seven schools in England suggested that students perceive a permeable boundary between science and their learning in science lessons and also a permeable boundary between religion and their learning in RE lessons, yet perceive a firm boundary between science lessons and RE lessons. We concluded that it is unreasonable to expect students to transfer instruction about cross-disciplinary perspectives across such impermeable subject boundaries. Finally we consider the implications of these findings for the successful management of cross-disciplinary education.