Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a key topic of interest in K-12 education. Children that are exposed at an early age to STEM curriculum, such as computer programming and computational thinking, demonstrate fewer obstacles entering technical fields. Increased knowledge of programming and computation in early childhood is also associated…

This paper reports on teachers' perceptions of students learning as part of a project examining teacher practice and student learning when using "ScratchMaths" in their classroom programmes. The project used design-based methodology, incorporating video-recorded classroom excerpts; teacher interviews; and teacher analysis and review of…

Noticing students' mathematical thinking is recognized as a key element of effective instruction, but novice teachers do not naturally attend to and make sense of student thinking. We describe a design experiment in which prospective teachers were engaged in analysis of minimally edited classroom video in order to support their ability to notice…

When to introduce negative integers to children is an important issue in school mathematics; delaying their introduction can lead to lasting misconceptions such as one cannot subtract a larger whole number from a smaller. Yet understanding negatives involves a complex extension of whole-number knowledge. It is not known whether this extension is…

To better understand the role that ways of reasoning play in students' success on integer addition and subtraction problems, we examined the relationship between students' flexible use of ways of reasoning and their performance on integers open number sentences. Within groups of students in 3 participant groups--39 2nd and 4th graders who had…

Results from a study involving 34 undergraduates supported the prediction from Paivo's dual coding theory (1986) that imaginal elaborations during lectures assist students' recall of both episodic and declarative information. The prediction that episodic memories would mediate retention of declarative information from the lecture was not…

The eight articles and two commentaries of this theme issue indicate the main lines of thinking represented at a symposium on the comprehension of graphics in text. The common assumption is that graphics per se do not have a direct effect on learning results but are effective only when processed adequately. (SLD)

The fundamental question in creating coding categories for an open-ended questionnaire is how to transform a complete transcript into manageable pieces of data. This paper describes the methodology involved in coding qualitative data derived from an evaluation of the Cognitive Approaches to School Leadership (CASL) program. The first task was to…

Six experiments involving 262 children (as young as 16 months and as old as fifth grade) indicate that the basic framework for coding location is present early in life and that later development consists of an increasing ability to impose organization on a broad range of bounded spaces. (SLD)

This paper examines the dual coding hypothesis, a model of the coding of visual and textual information, from the perspective of a mass media professional, such as a teacher, interested in accurately presenting both visual and textual material to a mass audience (i.e., students). It offers an extension to the theory, based upon the various skill…

This paper examines sixth-grade children's thinking related to solving ratio and proportion problems before these children had received any instruction in the domain. It explores unitizing and norming, one of the processes identified by both content analyses (Behr, Harel, Post, & Lesh, 1990); Harel, Behr, Post & Lesh, 1990) and research in…