Creativity is typically defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas or artifacts. This generative capacity is crucial to everyday problem solving, technological innovation, scientific discovery, and the arts. A central concern of cognitive scientists is to understand the processes that underlie human creative thinking. We review evidence…

Although there is wide evidence on young children's category learning, questions concerning how cognitive mechanisms and social mediation work collaboratively in this process remain sparse. Here, we study the impact of pedagogy in young children's categorization of novel artifacts. A before-and-after micro-genetic study compared 58 3-year-old…

In the context of a rapid digital transformation, digital competence is now regarded as a fourth cultural skill complementing reading, writing, and arithmetic. We argue that a well-structured and sound competence model is needed as a shared foundation for learning, teaching, pedagogical diagnostics and evaluative schemes in the school system.…

Conceptual approaches to contemporary physics topics pose many learning challenges. One factor influencing knowledge integration is a student's epistemic framing. Epistemic frames provide a context within which a particular situation is perceived, interpreted, and judged. The objective of this study is to explore secondary students' framings…

Using simulation approaches when conducting randomization tests for comparing two groups in the context of experimental studies has been promoted as a beneficial approach for supporting student learning of statistical inference. Many researchers have suggested that the data production process in simulations for the randomization test intuitively…

Relational reasoning, or the ability to identify meaningful patterns within streams of information, has emerged as an important factor in a variety of complex tasks. One factor that has received relatively little research attention, however, is how relational reasoning may be influenced by the representational systems (i.e., verbal or nonverbal)…

Abstract concepts dominate university science teaching, and much of this content is taught without sufficient connection to students' prior knowledge or everyday experiences. As this can be problematic for students, the aim of this research was to determine the utility and effectiveness of a professional development module on using analogies to…

We investigate teacher beliefs about discourses for equation solving and the challenges these beliefs might pose for the implementation of instructional practices that promote deductive reasoning in algebra. To uncover these beliefs, we recorded three video explanations of solutions to the same linear equation with distinct discursive…

This paper gives an example of how to address the challenge of designing a learning progression that describes student thinking, with the necessary specificity to align instructional opportunities and assessment tools. We describe the Conceptual Underpinnings of Evolution project and the iterative process of developing a novel learning progression…

The aim of this study was to show that some of the errors made by students when responding to mathematics assessment items can indicate progress in the development of conceptual understanding. By granting partial credit for specific incorrect responses by early secondary students, estimates of the difficulty of demonstrating full and partial…

This report documents how one undergraduate student used set-based reasoning to reinvent logical principles related to conditional statements and their proofs. This learning occurred in a teaching experiment intended to foster abstraction of these logical relationships by comparing the predicate and inference structures among various proofs (in…

A physical process analogy of the learning process was studied using a hydraulic method. Detailed educational guidance describing applied pedagogical concepts for technical instructors of the civil, mechanical, chemical and materials engineering disciplines was formulated. A unified engineering-friendly formulation of learning processes using a…

If an organic chemistry student explains that she represents a mechanistic step because ''it's a productive part of the mechanism,'' what meaning could the professor teaching the class attribute to this statement, what is actually communicated, and what does it mean for the student? The professor might think that the explanation is based on…

Like language, semantic memory is productive: It extends itself through self-derivation of new information through logical processes such as analogy, deduction, and induction, for example. Though it is clear these productive processes occur, little is known about the time course over which newly self-derived information becomes incorporated into…

This 22-session constructivist teaching experiment set out to investigate a preschool student's number understanding relative to his subitizing activity. Subitizing, a quick apprehension of the numerosity of a small set of items, has been found to characterize perceptual and conceptual processes students rely on as their understanding of number…