Reflective practice is considered a highly valued graduate attribute in the field of occupational therapy. Occupational therapy educators influence and shape how students develop into reflective practitioners. Reflective practice requires a set of complex thinking skills that are typically focused on personal experiences and can be broken down…

STEM instruction often uses visual representations. To benefit from these, students need to understand how representations show domain-relevant concepts. Yet, this is difficult for students. Prior research shows that physical representations (objects that students manipulate by hand) and virtual representations (objects on a computer screen that…

This article focuses on how the representational properties of manipulatives affect the strategies children employ in problem solving. Two studies examined the effect of physical materials on 4-7-year-old children's problem solving strategies in a numerical (i.e., additive composition) task. The first study showed how children not only identified…