This case study investigated the relationship between five undergraduate interior design students' reasoning with numerical units and reasoning about length and area. The multiplicative concepts frame participants' coordination of numerical units. Differences were found between participants' reasoning about length and area, based on their…

Studies on reasons accounting for the difficulties in learning public administration is relatively new in the public administration literature though many findings exist regarding students' difficulties in the study of different subject areas. This paper examines whether the perceived reasons in other subjects are real in the study of public…

Empirical evidence is insufficient on the specific roles GIS learning plays in developing students' understanding various spatial concepts. The present study aims to draw attention to common struggles of learning some spatial concepts in geography and offer directions for future research on GIS learning and the development of student spatial…

An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated "aha!" experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal…

It has become increasingly clear that the early use of decomposition for addition is associated with later mathematical achievement. This study examined how younger children execute a base-10 decomposition strategy to solve complex arithmetic (e.g. two-digit addition). 24 addition problems in two modalities (WA: Written Arithmetic; OA: Oral…

While contemporary mathematics education literature argues that curricular resources, such as textbooks, play a significant role guiding mathematics teachers in what and how they teach, it also shows that these resources often do not do what they say they will do, nor adhere to the standards they claim to further. When it comes to the most…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the understanding of prospective elementary mathematics teachers of the formal definition of the limit of a sequence. The participants were 32 prospective mathematics teachers (8 male and 24 female) who were in their third year of study in a four-year mathematics teacher preparation programme Istanbul…

There have been few studies on topic difficulty in the public administration curriculum of African universities. This is further problematized by non-existent literature on the relationships between gender, future career interest and country of study on student difficulty in the study of public administration. This is a gap in the public…

Students experience many difficulties learning the fundamental relationships in Newtonian mechanics, partly due to preexisting mental models that originate from their everyday lives. These preconceptions often persist even after instruction in mechanics and lead to a supposed incompatibility between physics lessons in school and personal…

General chemistry students need to understand the concept of intermolecular forces and use them to predict the properties of materials. To do this, they must create symbolic representations of molecules, relate these to physical observations, and explain them using submicroscopic theoretical constructs. When these concepts are taught separately,…

Present and future social and ecological challenges are complex both to understand and to attempt to solve. To comprehend the complex systems underlying these issues, students need systems thinking skills. However, in science education, a uniform delineation of systems thinking across contexts has yet to be established. While there seems to be…

Numerical magnitude knowledge is related to current math abilities and predictive of future math learning. However, this relationship has previously been shown only for knowledge of positive magnitudes; the present study is the first, to our knowledge, to examine the connection between magnitude knowledge and math ability with negative integers.…

The mole concept is one of the fundamental concepts in chemistry. However, a number of studies carried out in various countries have shown that teachers and learners face many difficulties in teaching and learning the concept. One of the underlying sources of teaching and learning difficulties of the mole concept identified in literature is the…

The present study examines university students' perceptions of learning academic terminology and using specialised language, and discusses the consequences of their vision. The aim is to elucidate the relationship between academic culture, academic education and the construction of knowledge in higher education. The fields of meaning and the level…

Chemical processes can be fully explained only by employing quantum mechanical models. These models are abstract and require navigation of a variety of cognitively taxing representations. Published research about how students use quantum mechanical models at the upper-division level is sparse. Through a mixed-methods study involving think-aloud…