In this article, the goal is to describe students' mathematical reasoning in the context of different settings of problem-solving tasks. The core of the tasks are real objects, which are presented to the students with the help of photos, a 3D model or in the environment itself. With reference to the experiential learning theory and relations to…

Research in Organic Chemistry education has revealed students' challenges in mechanistic reasoning. When solving mechanistic tasks, students tend to focus on explicit surface features, apply fragmented conceptual knowledge, rely on rote-memorization and, hence, often struggle to build well-grounded causal explanations. When taking a resource…

This paper describes the design of an instrument to assess secondary school students' proficiency in structure-property reasoning (SPR). Design criteria for the instrument required that it should be based on a comprehensive model for structure-property reasoning, assess both reproductive and productive use of structure-property reasoning, be…

The notion of algorithm may be perceived in different levels of abstraction. In the lower levels it is an operational set of instructions. In higher levels it may be viewed as an object with properties, solving a problem with characteristics. Novices mostly relate to the lower levels. Yet, higher levels are very relevant for them as well. We…

This study examines the collective mathematical reasoning when students and teachers in grades 3, 4, and 5 explore fractions derived from length comparisons, in a task inspired by the Elkonin and Davydov curriculum. The analysis showed that the mathematical reasoning was mainly anchored in mathematical properties related to fractional or algebraic…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

The present study evaluated: (1) the effects of two training programs designed for promoting Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in children aged 7/8; and (2) the relations between second-order recursive thinking (II-order-RT), advanced-ToM (Adv_ToM) and metacognition. Ninety-one 7- to 8-year-old children were assigned to one of three training conditions:…

Research suggests that physicians perform multiple reasoning tasks beyond diagnosis during patient review. However, these remain largely theoretical. The purpose of this study was to explore reasoning tasks in clinical practice during patient admission review. The authors used a constant comparative approach--an iterative and inductive process of…

Previous cross-cultural research using false-belief tasks has explored whether children's theory of mind develops synchronously across cultures. Success on false-belief tasks is usually interpreted as an important indicator of children's mental state understanding, but inconsistent findings have led to questions regarding the interpretation of…

Analogical reasoning is an important mechanism for social cognition in typically developing children, and recent evidence suggests that some forms of analogical reasoning may be preserved in autism spectrum disorder. An unanswered question is whether children with autism spectrum disorder can apply analogical reasoning to social information. In…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of different types of language tasks performed in Second Life (SL) on the oral performance of beginners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), focusing on oral accuracy. The 30 CSL beginners who participated in this study were randomly divided into two groups (n = 15 per group), required to…

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…

We applied a mixed-method research design to investigate the patterns of reasoning used by novice undergraduate chemistry students to classify chemical substances as elements, compounds, or mixtures based on their particulate representations. We were interested in the identification of the representational features that students use to build a…