In this dissertation study, I report on six middle school students' construction and interpretation of graphs and associated dynamic situations. Constructing and interpreting graphs represents a critical moment in middle school mathematics due to its opportunity to provide a powerful foundation for learning. Nevertheless, researchers have…

Semiotics is simply defined as the sign-using to represent a mathematical concept in a problem-solving. Semiotic reasoning of constructing concept is a process of drawing a conclusion based on object, representamen (sign), and interpretant. This paper aims to describe the phases of semiotic reasoning of elementary students in constructing the…

The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements…

Physical phenomena and relations can be described mathematically by functional dependencies. These are represented in the form of tables, graphs, algebraic expressions or verbal descriptions. Only the combination of different representations enables students to experience a physical phenomenon or concept in a holistic way. Therefore, students have…

This paper presents a transformative perspective on teacher education reform developed by His Excellency Mr. Sukavich Rangsitpol, former Minister of Education of Thailand. Grounded in the principle that "teachers teach the way they were taught," Sukavichinomics emphasizes that educational reform must begin with rethinking and…

It's not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of…

The aim of this study was to examine 6th-grade students' mathematical abstraction processes related to the concept of variable by using the teaching experiment method and to reveal their learning trajectories in the context of the RBC+C model. A teaching experiment was administered to a class of 29 middle school students for 3 weeks. Observations,…

A key property of relational representations is their "generativity": From partial descriptions of relations between entities, additional inferences can be drawn about other entities. A major theoretical challenge is to demonstrate how the capacity to make generative inferences could arise as a result of learning relations from…

Newton's third law is one of the most important concepts learned early in introductory mechanics courses; however, ample studies have documented a wide range of students' misconceptions and fragmented understandings of this concept that are difficult to change through traditional instruction. This research develops a conceptual framework model to…

Learning progressions (LPs) are novel models for the development of assessments in science education, that often use a scale to categorize students' levels of reasoning. Pictorial representations are important in chemistry teaching and learning, and also in LPs, but the differences between pictorial and verbal items in chemistry LPs is unclear. In…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

The capacity to recognise, represent, and reason about relationships between different quantities, that is, to think multiplicatively, has long been recognised as critical to success in school mathematics in the middle years and beyond. Building on recent research that found a strong link between multiplicative thinking and algebraic, geometrical,…

After describing Wittgenstein's notion of "certainty", in this article I provide four arguments to demonstrate that no certainty can be acquired at will. Specifically, I argue that, in order to assimilate a certainty, it is irrelevant whether the individual concerned (1) has found a ground that seemingly justifies that certainty; (2) has…

Learning trajectories are built upon progressions of mathematical understandings that are typical of the general population of students. As such, they are useful frameworks for exploring how understandings of diverse learners may be similar or different from their peers, which has implications for tailoring instruction. The purpose of this…