This paper presents the design and initial learning research with the MMM modeling platform, seeking to advance middle school students' learning through constructing computational models of complex physical and chemical systems. A complexity-based structure of an MMM interface is introduced. It suggests that a complex system can be described and…

Problem Statement: Rich stimuli received by sensory organs such as vision, hearing, and touch are important elements that affect an individual's perception, identification, classification, and conceptualization of the external world. In primary education, since students perform conceptual abstraction based upon concrete characteristics, when they…

Traditional mathematics education focuses on teaching rote procedures to solve problems, though these procedures are not usually motivated by goals. As a result, students have trouble flexibly using procedures and generalizing their knowledge to solve novel problems that differ from the problems they practice during instruction. In the following…

An experiment replicated and extended a previous study on the value of negative instances in concept learning (i.e., an instance of something which does not exemplify the concept helps to make clear what the concept is). In this experiment, the concept to be learned was "adverb". The subjects were seventh grade students. Some groups of subjects…

Results show that children with flexible styles obtained higher performances on school learning measures than children who used consistent styles. Study results suggest feasibility of identifying children who tend to use a consistent conceptual style for the purposes of prescribing instructional methods and materials. (Author/PC)