Many studies in science education research have found metacognition to be beneficial for undergraduate STEM students. Students do not necessarily know how to employ their metacognition without some training or prompting, and undergraduate chemistry instructors do not always have the capacity to instruct their students on metacognition. Thus, it…

When students solve problems on the Internet, they have to find a balance between quickly scanning large sections of information in web pages and deeply processing those that are relevant for the task. We studied how high school students articulate scanning and deeper processing of information while answering questions using a Wikipedia document,…

This practice paper provides a detailed scaffolded layout of how to embed computational thinking concepts into a project-based math methods course. Parallel to completing a project in which the in-service teachers design solutions for math struggles of their P-12 students, the graduate students reflect on their problem-solving activities using…

In order to understand how students approach multi-variate problems, we report a study on the cues organic chemistry graduate students perceive from mechanism tasks, and the reasoning processes induced by those cues. We used the think-aloud protocol in interviews with sixteen graduate students as they worked on two types of tasks: one, in which…

Students learned about electrical circuits in an arcade-type game consisting of 10 levels. For example, in one level students saw two circuits consisting of various batteries and resistors connected in series or parallel, and had to indicate which one had a higher rate of moving current. On levels 1-9, all students received a correct tone and had…