Students come to their high school physics classroom with experiences and knowledge that can be used to help explain physics concepts, but those experiences may not fully align with the scientifically accepted science concept. When there is a misalignment between a student's prior knowledge and the scientifically accepted concept a misconception…

It is common for students to make mistakes while solving mathematical problems. Some of these mistakes might be caused by the false ideas, or misconceptions, that students developed during their learning or from their practice. Calculus courses at the undergraduate level are mandatory for several majors. The introductory course of…

This study explored how instructional guide documents and high school engineering teachers understand the concept of mindset and the instructional practice of feedback as students engage in classroom problem-solving activities. From data analysis, several important conclusions were made. High school engineering teachers create a classroom climate…

With the expansion of computer science (CS) education, CS teachers in K-12 schools should be cognizant of student misconceptions and be prepared to help students establish accurate understanding of computer science and programming. This exploratory design-based research (DBR) study implemented a data-driven approach to identify secondary school…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) highlight the importance of students' conceptual understanding, mathematical reasoning, and problem solving in order to prepare students for college and careers. However, the success of this reform effort largely depends on how teachers actually design and implement instruction based on the…

Adults are prone to treating percents, one representational format of rational numbers, as novel cases of natural number. This suggests that percent values are not differentiated from natural numbers; a conceptual shift from the natural numbers to the rational numbers has not yet occurred. This is most surprising, considering people are inundated…

The purpose of this study is to examine the proportional reasoning of pre-service teachers at the beginning of their teacher preparation program using the developmental shifts described by Lobato and Ellis (2010). They cast changes in proportional reasoning as transitions or "shifts" in students' thinking and these shifts can serve as…

This study investigated the use of writing in a statistics classroom to learn if writing provided a rich description of problem-solving processes of students as they solved problems. Through analysis of 329 written samples provided by students, it was determined that writing provided a rich description of problem-solving processes and enabled…

Creativity is an important criterion for evaluating conceptual and design abilities of architects and their praxis. However, in recent years, the world has grown more complex. New problems have emerged that are often outside the architect's capacity. Given this challenge, architects collaborate with colleagues from architecture and other related…

The purpose of this study was to determine the ways in which cooperative problem solving in physics instructional laboratories influenced the students' ability to provide qualitative responses to problems. The literature shows that problem solving involves both qualitative and quantitative skills. Qualitative skills are important because those…

This study reports how 24 grade 4-6 students in one elementary and middle school interpreted formal and informal representations of variables. While interpretations for variables represented as letters (e.g., x and y) have been well established for students in algebra classes and beyond, little research into elementary school students'…

Number Concepts; Measurement; Geometry; Probability; Statistics; and Patterns, Functions and Algebra. Procedural Errors were further categorized into the following content categories: Computation; Measurement; Statistics; and Patterns, Functions, and Algebra. The results of the analysis showed the main sources of error for 6th, 7th, and 8th…

In this study, the author examined the relationship of probability misconceptions to algebra, geometry, and rational number misconceptions and investigated the potential of probability instruction as an intervention to address misconceptions in all 4 content areas. Through a review of literature, 5 fundamental concepts were identified that, if…

The purpose of this study was to determine (1) strategies students use when solving composition problems and the difficulties they encounter; (2) conceptions and/or misconceptions students have with respect to composition of functions; and (3) the effect of using dynamic visualization during instruction on students' understanding of composition of…