Humans routinely use external thinking tools, like pencil and paper, maps, and calculators, to solve cognitive problems that would have once been solved internally. As many youth face unprecedented exposure to increasingly capable technological aids, there is a growing pressure to understand children's cognitive offloading capacities and…

With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy…

Self-explanation prompts in example-based learning are usually directed backwards: Learners are required to self-explain problem-solving steps just presented ("retrospective" prompts). However, it might also help to self-explain upcoming steps ("anticipatory" prompts). The effects of the prompt type may differ for learners with…

Background: Spatial problem-solving is an essential skill for success in many engineering disciplines; thus, understanding the cognitive processes involved could help inform the design of training interventions for students trying to improve this skill. Prior research has yet to investigate the differences in cognitive processes between spatial…

The purpose of this study is to investigate students' thinking of direct, inverse and nonproportional problems. Thirty two seventh grade students from three different government schools participated in this study. To collect the data, the participants were asked to solve 9 open-ended problems, including 3 direct, 3 inverse and 3 non-proportional…

Relying on self-report to understand how children solve cognitive tasks has limitations, particularly with young children. Recent advances in eye-tracking technology allow researchers to leverage this tool to measure young children's strategies for solving cognitive tasks. The current study focuses on young children's mental rotation ability given…

STEM Problem solving necessitates a substantial amount of specialized domain knowledge. An important element of problem-solving within the domain includes how knowledge is structured and organized in memory to facilitate efficient retrieval of relevant information and future problem solving. In previous studies, however, problem solving and…

Many students persistently misinterpret histograms. This calls for closer inspection of students' strategies when interpreting histograms and case-value plots (which look similar but are different). Using students' gaze data, we ask: "How and how well do upper secondary pre-university school students estimate and compare arithmetic means of…

Mathematical modeling and applications are an important part of curriculum and considered to be important for students' current and future lives. In this contribution, we focus on mathematical modeling from a cognitive prospective. Following embedding the cognitive perspective within the discourse of mathematical modeling, we describe some of the…

Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second…

Background: In example-based learning, examples are often combined with generative activities, such as comparative self-explanations of example cases. Comparisons induce heavy demands on working memory, especially in complex domains. Hence, only stronger learners may benefit from comparative self-explanations. While static text-based examples can…

Problem solving requires the application of critical reading and thinking skills and the use of relevant strategies to reach a solution. Independent learners are able to apply taught strategies across contexts and often complete challenging tasks unassisted. The purpose of this paper is to explain how a process of analysis of assignments and…

Self-explanation, a learning strategy where students explain to themselves the steps taken in a worked example, is an effective learning strategy in early cognitive skill acquisition. However, many physics students produce self-explanations of low quality. There is also a lack of guidelines for what students should seek to explain when studying…

Students' problem-solving strategies and the differences among strategy groups were explored by analyzing the process data collected during student interactions with computer-based science items. Data were gathered from 1516 eleventh-grade students from 4 schools in China. Analyses of the sequences of students' response actions revealed that the…

Epistemic beliefs, epistemic cognitions, and self-regulation processes have a significant role in students' learning. Through this study, I investigated the role of mechanical engineering students' epistemic beliefs and epistemic cognitions involved in self-regulation processes while working on tasks with different difficulty levels. In this…