Despite the ongoing debate in academic circles regarding the impact of the arts on individual and collective well-being, there is a paucity of empirical research in this area. Nevertheless, recent studies have begun to establish a significant correlation between arts engagement and a range of positive outcomes. The objective of this study is to…

Mechanistic reasoning, or reasoning systematically through underlying factors and relationships that give rise to phenomena, is a powerful thinking strategy that allows one to explain and make predictions about phenomena. This article synthesizes and builds on existing frameworks to identify essential characteristics of students' mechanistic…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics highlight the importance of not only content standards for mathematics but also mathematical practices such as communication, representation, and reasoning, skills that are often difficult for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through a single-case multiple-probe-across-participants…

Sourcing involves interrogating historical documents, asking questions about their attributes to determine their relation to the historical event or time period under study. In this article, a university researcher and a sixth-grade teacher describe a set of heuristics that the teacher developed for supporting her students' sourcing of historical…

This study investigated the value of using a scaffolded critique framework to promote two different types of writing--argumentative writing and explanatory writing--with different purposes within an argument-based inquiry approach known as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach. A quasi-experimental design with sixth and seventh grade…

Although human reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics, recent studies have shown that adults and adolescents detect the biased nature of their judgments. The present study focused on the development of this critical bias sensitivity by examining the detection skills of young children in elementary school. Third and 6th graders were…

In this experimental study, 151 middle school students explored 3 historical controversies, first reading and discussing primary source documents in groups, then writing arguments on their own. Students were either randomly assigned to an experimental condition, using argumentative schemes and critical questions as guides during discussions, or to…

The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of guided, inquiry-based laboratory activities using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach and self-evaluation on students' science achievement. The study involved three sixth grade classes studying an electricity unit taught by the same primary school teacher. Before the study began, one…

Solving simple arithmetic word problems is a major ability that children must acquire throughout the primary-grade mathematics curriculum. However, this skill is often challenging for them. For instance, "unknown referent problems" are more difficult to solve than "unknown compare problems." In unknown compare problems, the…

The article focuses on pedagogical practices of recognition and esteem (Wertschatzung) and on the question of how those practices can be appropriately studied and epistemologically grasped. The investigation involves an inner-city elementary school in a socio-economically problematic district. With regard to the communication forms in this…

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…

This heuristic narratological inquiry used video-taped interviews and observations to explore the experiences of 145 urban students in grades one through six who also represented diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The goal of the study was to identify curricular and pedagogical strategies that enhance what students love about school,…