Reflective practice is considered a highly valued graduate attribute in the field of occupational therapy. Occupational therapy educators influence and shape how students develop into reflective practitioners. Reflective practice requires a set of complex thinking skills that are typically focused on personal experiences and can be broken down…

STEM instruction often uses visual representations. To benefit from these, students need to understand how representations show domain-relevant concepts. Yet, this is difficult for students. Prior research shows that physical representations (objects that students manipulate by hand) and virtual representations (objects on a computer screen that…

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…

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical…

The authors investigated the role of perceptual attunement in an emergency braking task in which participants waited until the last possible moment to slam on the brakes. Effects of the size of the approached object and initial speed on the initiation of braking were used to identify the optical variables on which participants relied at various…

The differences between school learning and other learning are discussed. To make these types of learning more similar, schools must develop students' skills slowly and must stress practical problem solving. Education then will be fulfilling its cultural function of promoting reason and analysis based on shared knowledge. (VM)

Various counting tasks were presented to 24 congenitally, totally blind children, aged 3-13, to determine the behaviors employed to ensure accurate counting. Three dimensions of tactile strategies were found, including "scanning,""organizing," and "partitioning." A developmental progression in the ontogenesis of each…

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies, concept maps and manipulation of objects, and to determine if either works better with individual learners or in cooperative learning groups. A total of 80 sixth-grade students in science education were randomly assigned to group or individual…