Since formal mathematics is discussed in terms of abstract symbols, many students face difficulties to acquire a clear understanding of mathematical concepts and ideas. Transforming abstract or dis-embodied representations of mathematical concepts and ideas into embodied representations is a strategy to make mathematics more tangible and…

This study investigated the computational thinking (CT) practices of eight pre-service teachers through their Scratch and Python programs. Conducted within an undergraduate-level computer science education course, students learned CT concepts via parallel instruction in block-based programming (Scratch) and text-based programming (Python). The…

We propose the first steps towards a rigorous analysis of the effectiveness of an emerging pedagogy, Computational Thinking. We found that two aspects of the pedagogy have a positive effect with regard to enhancing two cognitive processes, namely sequential thinking and in abstract thinking. Our data was gathered experimentally with a cohort of…

While AI has become more prevalent in our society than ever, many young learners are found holding various naive, erroneous conceptions of AI due to the influence of their technology and media environments. To address this issue, this study seeks to propose a novel pedagogical solution to improve upper-elementary school students' scientific…

Mathematical reasoning requires perseverance to overcome the cognitive and affective difficulties encountered whilst pursuing a reasoned line of enquiry. The aims of the study were: to understand how children's perseverance in mathematical reasoning (PiMR) manifests in reasoning activities, and to examine how PiMR can be facilitated through a…

Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the…

There is considerable interest in the cultivation of student graphic literacy among educators and researchers, especially in the sciences. Previous research, however, has shown that many students manifest difficulties in using diagrammatic representations. One explanation that has been proposed to account for these difficulties is that certain…

Geometry is one of the branches of mathematics that we use in many areas of our daily life, perhaps without noticing. For this reason, individuals are geometric thinkers not only in geometry classes; but also in different areas of life. In that case, it is necessary for the individual to acquire geometric habits of mind. The purpose of this study…

Background: We tested the effects of an intervention on the learning of introductory thermodynamics principles. This intervention, OEM-Thermo, is designed to prompt the cognitive operations of meaningful learning: organization, elaboration, and monitoring. We also sought evidence to show that execution of these operations was associated with…

A perspective is presented on how the representation mapping framework by Hahn and Chater (1998) may be used to characterize reasoning during problem solving in chemistry. To provide examples for testing the framework, an exploratory study was conducted with students and professors from three different courses in the middle of the undergraduate…

Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to understand figurative speech, which relies heavily on metaphor. This article explores why metaphors challenge learners and presents ways to incorporate metaphors into EFL instruction to help learners understand figurative speech. Topics discussed include cognitive metaphor,…

A growing body of research has examined the experiential grounding of scientific thought and the role of experiential intuitive knowledge in science learning. Meanwhile, research in cognitive linguistics has identified many "conceptual metaphors" (CMs), metaphorical mappings between abstract concepts and experiential source domains,…

While many researchers in science education have argued that students' epistemological understanding of models and of modelling processes would influence their cognitive processing on a modelling task, there has been little direct evidence for such an effect. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relation between students' epistemological…

Although many students who enter kindergarten are cognitively ready to meet the demands of the kindergarten mathematics curriculum, some students arrive without the early abstract reasoning abilities necessary to benefit from the instruction provided. Those who do not possess key cognitive abilities, including understandings of conservation,…

This study examined the conduct of academic tasks in six secondary classrooms, focusing specifically on assigments requiring some higher level cognitive operations, with attention to how management strategies and classroom conditions associated with these assignments affect their cognitive demands on students. Analysis of tasks in these six…