Game-based learning has gained significant attention from educational researchers because of its ability to create an engaging and enjoyable learning environment for students. However, there was a research gap regarding the design of game mechanics that specifically helped students understand abstract scientific concepts. Also, the impact of…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the similarities between abductive reasoning and entrepreneurial learning processes in order to contribute to the conceptual understanding of learning as an entrepreneurial process in itself. Design/methodology/approach: The research is theoretically rooted in a conceptual development of the…

This study aimed at identifying the level of scientific argumentation skills in chemistry subject among Omani Grade 11th students and the effects of their logical thinking skills and gender on this level. The study sample consisted of (400) male and female students selected purposely from one educational region in Oman. The study's instruments…

Supporting students in building well-grounded explanations plays a crucial role in scientific practice. Research in organic chemistry education on students' mechanistic explanations, however, has revealed various challenges. When solving mechanistic tasks, students experience difficulties when (I) deriving implicit properties from structural…

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…

In this paper, we present a novel approach to defining, teaching, and assessing creativity by examining its origins and delineating the processes involved. The rationale for introducing this framework developed from studying existing thinking and questioning the current metrics for measuring creativity, which we posit are unfit for purpose. We…

According to Geary's evolutionary approach, humans are able to easily acquire primary knowledge and, with more efforts, secondary knowledge. The present study investigates how primary knowledge contents can facilitate the learning of formal logical rules, i.e., secondary knowledge. Framing formal logical problems in evolutionary salient contexts…

This concluding commentary takes the perspective of research on practicing scientists and engineers to consider what open areas and future directions on relational thinking and learning should be considered beyond the impressive research presented in the special issue. Areas for more work include (a) a need to examine educational applications of…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how associationism mistakenly assumes that direct experience is possible; that is, there is expectation-free observation and association without prior expectation. Thus, associationism assumes that learning involves the absorption of information from the environment itself. However, contrary…

Successful analogical reasoning requires an analogue in a source domain to have high degrees of structural and surface similarity with a learning task in a target domain. It also requires learners to have sufficient source- and target-domain knowledge. We review the literature and speculate that "less" might create "more"; in…

Analogous thinking has been commonly discussed as being an inherent and distinguishing characteristic of human cognition (e.g., Gentner, 2010; Goldstone, Day, & Son, 2010; Holyoak, in press; Rittle-Johnson & Star, in press). Gentner (2003) has argued that as part of the human cognitive toolbox, comparison accompanied by the relational language to…

Reasoning and learning are closely related, both being the methods of solving problems, learning usually results from the process of reasoning. All inventions, discoveries, art, literature and advances in culture and civilization are based on thinking, reasoning and problem solving capacity of human being. A sound reasoning leads to better…

This paper argues that if conclusions about children's grasp of logical concepts are to be reached and acceptable lines of research followed, then more precise definitions of the concept "logical necessity" must be formulated. The paper defines logical necessity as "the unconditional guarantee of truth that accompanies valid…