Through analysis of a classroom lesson led by a decorated teacher, we illustrate how instructional practices favor students seeking empirical patterns at the expense of using mechanistic reasoning. In the lesson, when students spontaneously come up with hypothetical mechanisms to explain why a light bulb in an electric circuit does or does not…

Within the last decade, different educational data mining techniques, particularly quantitative methods such as clustering, and regression analysis are widely used to analyze the data from educational games. In this research, we implemented a quantitative data mining technique (clustering) to further investigate students' feedback. Students played…

The Assessment of Performance Unit recognized the importance of reading and interpreting data but saw them as discrete aspects of "process" science. However, pupil performance on different components of the same data-handling assessment question is often very variable, indicating that these questions carry "hidden" cognitive…