Seen as one of the essential domains for active citizenship, examining how students relate to science has become crucial. Based on a person‐centered approach, this article investigates self‐related dispositions and motivation in science using the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data set. By employing a latent profile analysis, student profiles were investigated among 11,583 15‐year‐old‐students in Italy. Five distinct student groups were identified. The index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS), immigrant background, gender, study programs, and the accompanying learning environment were also inspected. Each group was observed against particular subdomains in science competence in line with the PISA framework and environmental awareness. The results indicate the profiles differed on the examined covariates and showed distinct patterns relative to achievement and environmental awareness. However, differences in achievement between the profiles could not be explained by students’ variability in immigrant background or ESCS across the examined groups.

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Research on academic learning indicates that many students experience major difficulties with introductory statistics and methodology courses. We hypothesized that students' difficulties may depend in part on the fact that statistics tasks are commonly viewed as related to the threatening domain of math. In two field experiments which we carried out in the ecological context of introductory statistics courses, the representation of a statistics task administered to undergraduate students in Psychology (Study 1; n = 127) and Biology (Study 2; n = 166) was manipulated. In both studies we found that students who reported the least favorable prior attainments in math had their performance thwarted when the task was presented as related to the math domain, whereas no performance impairment was observed when the task was presented as related to the verbal/linguistic domain. Implications of the findings for the design and delivery of introductory statistics and research methodology courses are discussed.

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Achievement evaluation in school contexts may be considered as a kind of social judgment, which is affected by social and moral determinants since it is not merely an estimation of pupils' accomplishment (Dompnier, Pansu, & Bressoux, 2006;Weiner, 2003). Teachers' judgments have been investigated starting from the analysis of two theoretical approaches: the norm of internality (Dubois, 2003), and the attributional approach to social motivation (Weiner, 2006). In order to study the social valorization of internal explanations referring to effort in school context, an empirical research has been conducted. Our study investigates how teachers evaluate fictitious pupils, which are supposed to explain events by means of different types of causal explanations. According to our results, pupils providing effort-based explanations receive more positive judgments. Findings are discussed by considering effort as a key principle of school environments.Achievement evaluation in school contexts may be considered as a kind of social judgment, which is affected by social and moral determinants, since it is not merely an estimation of pupils' accomplishment. The perceived causality of school failure/success, or the causes indicated by pupils to explain achievement-related events, have been explored as determinants of teachers' judgment by two main theoretical approaches, i.e., the norm of internality (Beauvois & Dubois, 1988, for a review: Pansu, Dubois, & Dompnier, this special issue), and the attributional approach as conceptualized by Weiner (2006, for a review: Reyna, this special issue).Several studies show that pupils and teachers explain school results (success or failure) through internal causal attribution on ability (cognitive abilities, aptitudes, skills or expertise),