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The research investigated relationships amongst beliefs about the self-regulation of learning (SRL), study strategies and academic performance in 366 pre-service teachers. A Beliefs about Learning and Teaching (BALT) Questionnaire was used to examine beliefs that were both consistent and inconsistent with SRL. The final model emerging from the structural equation analysis showed that beliefs consistent with SRL were positive predictors of the self-reported use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, while beliefs inconsistent with SRL were negative predictors. The use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies was in turn a positive predictor of the pre-service teachers' academic performance. About 50% of the teachers simultaneously agreed with statements indicating beliefs consistent and inconsistent with SRL. We argue that the co-existence of beliefs consistent and inconsistent with SRL undermines the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in pre-service teachers, with negative effects on their academic performance. It is suggested that interventions to support teachers to promote metacognition and SRL can be more effective if they address preservice teachers' beliefs that are not consistent with SRL and especially beliefs in transmissive teaching.

Background: Students are more effective when they employ appropriate strategies to regulate their learning processes and outcomes. However, many teachers do not provide, or provide very little, explicit instructions to promote this self-regulated learning (SRL). This suggests that teachers' belief systems may include beliefs that may be inconsistent with SRL. Aims: This paper reported the validation of the 78-item Beliefs about Teaching and Learning (BALT) instrument designed to measure pre-service teachers' beliefs about learning and teaching with particular emphasis on SRL. Samples: Out of the 78 items included in the BALT instrument, 50 of them were administered in BALT 1 and 53 in BALT2 with 25 items administered in both surveys and were common to both instruments. The BALT 1 was administered to 430 pre-service teachers. BALT 2 was administered to 366 pre-service students. Methods: Confirmatory factor analysis and the Rasch model were used to investigate the unidimensionality of the scales and psychometric properties of the items. In addition, the summated rating scale procedure was used to create composite scores for the examination of the coexistence of beliefs both consistent and inconsistent with SRL. Results: Pre-service teachers expressed high overall agreement with items related to beliefs consistent with SRL and low agreement with items related to beliefs inconsistent with SRL. However, many of them also indicated high agreement with items related to beliefs in Transmissive Teaching. Conclusions: The study resulted in the development of a 58-item instrument, which was balanced with respect to the inclusion of SRL-consistent and SRL-inconsistent items. This study also provided evidence for the coexistence of pre-service teachers' beliefs in Constructive Teaching and Transmissive Teaching.

We argue that there is an increasing reliance on analytic strategies compared to visuospatial strategies, which is related to geometry expertise and not on individual differences in cognitive style. A Visual/Analytic Strategy Test (VAST) was developed to investigate the use of visuo-spatial and analytic strategies in geometry in 30 mathematics teachers and 134 11th grade students. Students' performance in the VAST was also compared to performance in tests of visuo-spatial abilities, of abstract reasoning, and of geometrical knowledge. The results showed high performance of all the participants in the VAST items that could be solved by relying on visuo-spatial strategies. However, only the math teachers showed high performance in the VAST items that required the application of analytic geometrical strategies. There were high correlations between the students' performance in the tests of visuo-spatial and abstract reasoning abilities and the VAST Analytic Strategies scale, but the contribution of these tests to the VAST analytic performance became statistically insignificant when geometrical knowledge was used as a mediating factor. The implications of this work for the learning and assessment of geometrical knowledge are discussed.

Research has shown that differences in the prior knowledge of the participants and in the learning indexes adopted can explain why some studies show positive learning effects of analogy enriched text while others do not. In the present studies, these two factors were combined into one through the construction of a learning index that measured incremental positive changes in the participants' prior knowledge after reading an analogy enriched or no analogy text. A second learning index was also used to evaluate whether the participants created well-formed conceptual models after reading the science text. These learning indexes were used in two studies in which the effects of analogy enriched versus no analogy text were compared on the learning of the scientific explanations of the day/night cycle and of the seasons. The participants were 3rd and 5th graders in the first study and 6th graders and college students in the other. Although only few of the participants learned the correct scientific explanation, those who read the analogy enriched text produced more incremental positive changes in their pretest explanations at posttest and delayed test and created more well-formed conceptual models close to the scientific one than those who read the no analogy text. They also recalled more information and created fewer invalid inferences in their recalls. The results indicate that analogies can be used without reservation to facilitate the learning of science and have broader implications about how to evaluate the learning of science in general.

Contemporary theories of learning and instruction emphasise the importance of students knowing how to effectively regulate their learning. A large body of research indicates that effective regulation of learning is beneficial for achievement. Set against this research are findings showing that the promotion by teachers of strategies for the self-regulation of learning (SRL), and student use of these strategies, is less common than might be expected. We review this research on the promotion and use of SRL strategies and suggest that a range of beliefs about learning and SRL strategies limit the promotion of SRL learning strategies by teachers. This contributes in turn to the lack of knowledge and use of such strategies by students. These beliefs are represented as forming an interrelated system that needs to be made explicit and examined in order to increase the level of SRL strategy promotion and use. Each of the beliefs is described and the paper concludes with discussion of the implications of the review for teacher educators, teachers, students, school leaders, curriculum designers and researchers.

We investigate the hypothesis that Executive Functions(EFs) are implicated in the learning of science andmathematics by examining the relation betweenperformance in two Science and Mathematics ConceptualUnderstanding and Conceptual Change (CU&C) tasks,and two Stroop-like Inhibition and Shifting EF tasks, in agroup of 69 4th and 6th grader children. The results showedhigh correlations between accuracy performance in theCU&C and EF tasks even when Intelligence Ability (IA)and Age were partialed out. A path analytic model showedthat performance in the CU&C tasks could be explainedby performance in the EF and IA tasks, which werepositively related to each other. Further analyses showedthat accuracy of performance particularly in the CU&Ctasks could be predicted by performance in the EF tasks,with high or medium EF scores being a prerequisite forplacement in the group of high CU&C achievers.

We argue that the acquisition of chemistry expertise requires considerable conceptual changes, which among otherthings involve a change from reliance on visual-spatial thinking to the employment of analytic strategies. We also argue thatthis shift in chemistry and specifically in knowledge about molecular structure is related to the acquisition of expertise and notto individual differences in visual-spatial thinking. In this presentation we will present an experiment designed to investigatethe visual-analytic shift in knowledge about molecular structure in 132 11th graders. The results showed that the students,who were novices in chemistry, could solve the items requiring visual strategies but not those requiring analytic strategies,suggesting that they had not achieved the visual/analytic shift. Additional studies are needed to compare novices and experts inorder to further test our hypothesis regarding the visual-analytic shift in chemistry.

Prior research has investigated the recruitment of inhibition in the use of science/mathematics concepts in tasks that require the rejection of a conflicting, nonscientific initial concept. The present research examines if inhibition is the only EF skill recruited in such tasks and investigates whether shifting is also involved. It also investigates whether inhibition and/or shifting are recruited in tasks in which the use of science/mathematics concepts does not require the rejection of an initial concept, or which require only the use of initial concepts. One hundred and thirty-three third- and fifth-grade children participated in two inhibition and shifting tasks and two science and mathematics conceptual understanding and conceptual change (CU&C) tasks. All the tasks were on-line, and performance was measured in accuracy and RTs. The CU&C tasks involved the use of initial concepts and of science/mathematics concepts which required conceptual changes for their initial formation. Only in one of the tasks the use of the science/mathematics concepts required the concurrent rejection of an initial concept. The results confirmed that in this task inhibition was recruited and also showed that the speed of shifting was a significant predictor of performance. Shifting was a significant predictor of performance in all the tasks, regardless of whether they involved science/mathematics or initial concepts. It is argued that shifting is likely to be recruited in complex tasks that require multiple comparisons of stimuli and the entertainment of different perspectives. Inhibition seems to be a more selective cognitive skill likely to be recruited when the use of science/mathematics concepts requires the rejection of a conflicting initial concept.

We present two studies that investigated the adoption of visual/spatial and analytic strategies by individuals at different levels of expertise in the area of organic chemistry, using the Visual Analytic Chemistry Task (VACT). The VACT allows the direct detection of analytic strategy use without drawing inferences about underlying mental processes. The first study examined the psychometric properties of the VACT and revealed a structure consistent with the hypothesis that it consists of two sub-scales: visual/spatial and analytic. The second study investigated the performance of 285 participants with various levels of expertise in organic chemistry on the VACT. The results showed that the adoption of analytic strategies in organic chemistry, and specifically in molecular structure, was difficult and was systematically used only by the more expert participants. The implications of this research for the teaching of chemistry are discussed.

The present research tested the hypothesis that the reading of science text can create new misconceptions in students with incongruent prior knowledge, and that these new misconceptions will be similar to the fragmented and synthetic conceptions obtained in prior developmental research. Ninety-nine third- and fifth-grade children read and recalled one of two texts that provided scientific or phenomenal explanations of the day/night cycle. All the participants gave explanations of the phenomenon in question prior to reading one of the texts and after they read it. The results showed that the participants who provided explanations of the day/night cycle at pretest incongruent with the scientific explanation recalled less information and generated more invalid inferences. An analysis of the participants' posttest explanations indicated that these readers formed new misconceptions similar to the fragmented and synthetic conceptions obtained in developmental research. The implications of the above for text comprehension and science education research are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to propose a process model to explain elementary school students' solutions of three simple problems in elementary mechanics. Forty eight 5th grade students were given three drawings depicting objects of various sizes in different kinetic states or being pushed by a human agent. They were asked to say whether a force was being exerted on the objects and to explain why. A process model has been proposed to explain students' answers to the three questions. The innovation of the process model is that it attempts to link two levels of representation: A semantic level, where a concept is analysed in terms of the presuppositions, beliefs, and mental models that underlie it and a syntactic level that specifies how concepts are related to other concepts in hierarchical categories. The work has been validated by a computer model designed by the AI team (Vosniadou, Kayser, Champesme, loannides & Dimitrakopoulou, in press).