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Asian science is experiencing rapid development. The same is true for its science education. The 15 year old students in Singapore, Macao(China), Hong Kong(China), Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong(China), BeijingShanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang(China), and Korea performed well in mathematics and science tests (OECD, 2016; OECD, 2019a). Nevertheless, there are several deficiencies in Asian science education. The exam-centric education system in most of the Asian countries usually concentrates on content knowledge and neglects of nurturing students’ innovative thinking, which would hamper the rise of Asian science (Lim, 2010). For example, comparing to American college students, Chinese students gained much better scores on tests of physics content knowledge but failed to maintain that advantage on tests of scientific reasoning (Bao et al., 2009). Meanwhile, it seems that some traditional advanced countries, such as the United States and the UK, also face challenges in maintaining their leading advantages in science. Despite many years of standards-based reform, the US only had minimal improvements in its science education (“The Science of Education Reform,” 2006). The US students’ mathematics and science achievements in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test were significantly behind the Asian participating countries and other developed nations (“Change the Equation,” 2011), and this status was not meliorated in the 2015 and 2018 PISA tests, especially in the mathematics test (OECD, 2016; OECD, 2019a). Although the UK students’ science and mathematics performance in 2015 and 2018 PISA tests were better than the US students, the UK also needed to deal with its students losing their interests in mathematics and science during the secondary school period (“Science Education Reforms in the UK,” 2012). On account of there are some important factors in school environments influencing students’ science learning, this paper intends to depict a clear picture of how these factors are integrated to affect a student’s science performance. Abstract. This research explores whether classroom life (CL), textbooks (TE), and learning initiative (LI) are mediators between instruction (P) and science performance, as well as whether these mechanisms are moderated by gender. 484 eighth grade students completed the questionnaire with four subscales of P, LI, TE, and CL. For the needs of triangulation and complementarity, three focus group interviews were conducted later. Based on mediation analysis and multi-group structural equation modeling, it was found that 1) the direct effects of P on LI, P on CL, P on TE, and LI on science performance are significant, while the other direct effects are insignificant; 2) comparing to the male group, the direct effect of P on LI in the female group is larger; 3) characteristics hindering students’ science learning include: the pace of a lesson is too fast, pictures and experiments are less in the textbook, and top students and low proficiency students are uncooperative. Findings expose that instruction significantly influence students’ science performance, and this impact is completely mediated by students’ learning initiatives. The relation between instruction and learning initiative is stronger in the female group. Textbooks can be useless in the context that instruction does not match students’ learning ability.

IMPACT OF INSTRUCTION ON SCIENCE PERFORMANCE: LEARNING INITIATIVE AS A MEDIATOR AND GENDER AS A LIMITED MODERATOR