This article investigates the incorporation of loose parts as a means to enhance student creativity within educational environments. Loose parts refer to flexible, movable objects that can be manipulated, combined, and repurposed in various ways. The study delves into the theoretical underpinnings that support the connection between loose parts…

Physical manipulatives enhanced knowledge acquisition by engaging learners in hands-on experiences that supported spatial reasoning. These tools allowed learners to see, touch, and manipulate objects, improving their ability to mentally rotate and visualize structures. This study challenged the assumption that most learners are purely visual by…

"Research Findings:" Promoting children's science knowledge by adequate measures such as guided or free play is a cardinal goal of preschool. However, there is considerable variability in preschool teachers' instructional quality in block play, which might be associated with children's domain-specific science skills but also their…

Introduction: The aim of this study was to determine whether individuals with congenital blindness make more recognizable drawings of known objects that are furniture sized (table, man, tree) rather than hand sized (egg, coconut, banana; Hypothesis 1). We also investigated whether knowledge that the tactile drawings had been produced by people who…

This article focuses on how the representational properties of manipulatives affect the strategies children employ in problem solving. Two studies examined the effect of physical materials on 4-7-year-old children's problem solving strategies in a numerical (i.e., additive composition) task. The first study showed how children not only identified…

This study aims to assess whether the handling of concrete ball-and-stick molecular models promotes translation between diagrammatic representations and a concrete model (or vice versa) and the coordination of the different types of structural representations of a given molecular structure. Forty-one Algerian undergraduate students were requested…