This work explores the complex cognitive processes students engage in when addressing contextual tasks requiring linear and exponential models. Grounded within Piagetian constructivism and the Knowledge in Pieces (KiP) epistemological perspective (diSessa, 1993, 2018), this empirical study in a clinical setting develops a Microgenetic Learning…

Teachers exercising reflexivity through their internal conversations is one of the most important factors in the process of curriculum change. Drawing from Margaret Archer's theory, this research explores teachers' internal conversations in their own descriptions about a range of matters related to curriculum making. Eight secondary school…

Understanding fraction as a quantity has been identified as a key developmental understanding. In this study, students in Grades 5, 8, and 11 were asked to compare the areas of two halves of the same square--a rectangle and a right triangle. Findings from this study suggest that students who understand fraction as a quantity use reasoning related…

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Adelphi University engaged in a year-long program revision of its mathematics major, which was initiated by a longitudinal study and the publication of the 2015 Curriculum Guide by the MAA's Committee on Undergraduate Programs in Mathematics. This paper stands as a short story, so to speak, of…

We present a framework designed to help categorize various sense making moves, allowing for greater specificity in describing and understanding student reasoning and also in the development of curriculum to support this reasoning. The framework disaggregates between the mechanisms of student reasoning (the cognitive "tool" that they are…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

Geometrical concepts play a crucial role in developing spatial thinking and reasoning. Further, curricular materials play a key role in shaping student-learning experiences in the classroom. The organisation of the content of textbooks plays a decisive role in how and when students are introduced to concepts, especially given the…

Jason Anderson's proposal, in "ELT Journal" (2015), for an affordance-based approach to lesson planning raises important issues in teacher education. However, his arguments against the role of planned outcomes in favour of an affordance-based focus using learning opportunities as units of planning fail to acknowledge the complexities…

With the emergence of a wealth of research-based information in the field of educational neuroscience, educators are now able to make more evidence-based decisions in the important area of curriculum design and construction. By viewing from the perspective of educational neuroscience, we can give a more meaningful and lasting purpose of leading to…

This paper explores teachers' perceptions of their learners' proficiency in statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking. Research in Statistics education has prompted a move away from the teaching of statistical skills, towards focusing on the development of statistical literacy, reasoning and thinking. The recent South African Grade 10-12…

Appeals to reform science education by policy makers are not new phenomena. To be sure, while science reform efforts have been ongoing occurrences for nearly six decades, perpetual educational reform efforts as a whole have been evolving and gaining momentum in number for more than a century. The general motivation for continual reform appears to…

Explores ways to organize skills which aid in developing the reasoning process. Suggests a social studies curriculum which focuses on a skill network composed of facilitating skills (observation, classification, spatial relationships), processes (inferring, predicting, hypothesizing), and operations (communications, interpretation, social…

An examination is made of dependency in the area of educational analysis and policy formation on the use of metaphorical thinking. A clarification is made of the conceptual difficulties that arise from the inability to understand the difference between the phenomenological world and the symbolic world. (JN)

Describes characteristics of successful problem solvers and reports programs at all educational levels designed to help students improve their skills. (Author/MLF)