An ability to engage in system thinking is necessary to understand complex problems. While many pre-college students use system modeling tools, there is limited evidence of student reasoning about causal relationships that interact in diverging and converging chains, and how these affect system behavior. A chemistry unit on gas phenomena was…

Mechanistic explanations, aiming to disclose details of entities and their activities, employ the act of unpacking which, inherently and paradoxically, produces explanatory gaps--pieces of undisclosed, undetailed mechanistic information. These gaps, termed explanatory black boxes, are often perceived as counterproductive to the teaching of…

Introduction: There is a variety of literature regarding reading development in its acquisitional stages, and also regarding reading disabilities that appear in early childhood. However, from the cognitive point of view, there has been less study of reading comprehension in secondary students. The principal aim of this study was to analyze the…

Logical thinking and reasoning of geometric space are among the key abilities of science and technology education. This research developed a framework of an alternate reality-based board game incorporating augmented reality (AR) exploration with multi-dimensional scaffolding, including "cognitive scaffolding," "metacognitive…

Theories of grounded and embodied cognition offer a range of accounts of how reasoning and body-based processes are related to each other. To advance theories of grounded and embodied cognition, we explore the "cognitive relevance" of particular body states to associated math concepts. We test competing models of action-cognition…

Theories of grounded and embodied cognition offer a range of accounts of how reasoning and body-based processes are related to each other. To advance theories of grounded and embodied cognition, we explore the "cognitive relevance" of particular body states to associated math concepts. We test competing models of action-cognition…

Motivated by often passingly brief textbook discussions of industrial capacitors, this study examines how students make sense of textbook descriptions to create an industrial rolled-up capacitor. A total of 37 junior-year students at a top high school in Beijing, China, participated in the study. The participants followed their textbook guidance…

Visuospatial thinking is considered crucial for understanding of three-dimensional spatial concepts in STEM disciplines. Despite their importance, little is known about the underlying cognitive processing required to spatially reason and the varied strategies students may employ to solve visuospatial problems. This study seeks to identify and…

Background: A job is undertaken for a particular period of an individual's life and with chances for progress. The constructive way to know about the individual's inner strength. Career ability for high school students is essential to identify their capabilities in different career choices and choose the appropriate one, which helps in reaching…

Background: A job is undertaken for a particular period of an individual's life and with chances for progress. The constructive way to know about the individual's inner strength. Career ability for high school students is essential to identify their capabilities in different career choices and choose the appropriate one, which helps in reaching…

In this paper, we present a case study of a pair of students as they use nondisciplinary communicative practices to mechanistically reason about binary star dynamics. To do so, we first review and bring together the theoretical perspectives of social semiotics and embodied cognition, therein developing a new methodological approach for analyzing…

This mixed method study was aimed at examining the influence of dual processing (Type 1 and Type 2 thinking) on the development of high school students' nature of science (NOS) views. Type 1 thinking is intuitive, experiential, and heuristic. Type 2 thinking is rational, analytical, and explicit. Three research questions were asked: (1) Do the…

We develop a theory of grounded and embodied mathematical cognition (GEMC) that draws on action-cognition transduction for advancing understanding of how the body can support mathematical reasoning. GEMC proposes that participants' actions serve as inputs capable of driving the cognition-action system toward associated cognitive states. This…

The present study sought to design calculus tasks to determine students' preference for visual or analytic processing as well as examine the role of preferred mode of processing in calculus performance and its relationship to spatial ability and verbal-logical reasoning ability. Data were collected from 150 high school students who were enrolled…

To investigate relationships between students' quantitative reasoning with fractions and their algebraic reasoning, a clinical interview study was conducted with 18 middle and high school students. The students were interviewed twice, once to explore their quantitative reasoning with fractions and once to explore their solutions of problems…