Incorporating small-group discussions in classrooms has shown promising benefits in improving 4th grade students' thinking and social skills; however, the practice remains challenging. Although teachers are motivated to try to incorporate small-group discussions, studies examining the shift from teacher-dominated classroom practice towards a more…

Even though a school in Southern Virginia had been utilizing a variety of manipulatives, calculators, and computers to transition students through the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) sequence; students did not meet the state proficiency requirement on the standardized math assessment. A qualitative descriptive case study design, grounded…

This research study explored robotics as the catalyst for computational thinking (CT) by sixth-grade students as they are engaged in a science lesson. The interactions, understandings, and applications are discussed, along with the participants' connections and implementations of CT concepts (decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition, and…

Computational thinking aims to outline fundamental skills from computer science that everyone should learn. As currently defined, with help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), these skills include problem formulation, logically organizing data, automating solutions through algorithmic thinking, and representing data through abstraction.…

The aims of this study were to investigate how upper-elementary-grade students compare the volume of rectangular prisms of equal volume (specifically, students' noticing and reasoning for invariance of volume and coordination of the three linear dimensions of rectangular prisms) and how students' levels of sophistication in volume measurement…