The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even about novel objects, and how do people draw…

Physics teachers need diagnostic competence to effectively identify students' misconceptions, but studies have yet to sufficiently investigate how this competence can be advanced through various instructional strategies. In this study, we compared a problem-solving strategy against an example-based strategy in advancing diagnostic competence in…

While commercially available mixed-reality (MR) head-mounted devices are also increasingly used in education the impact of MR learning environments is mostly being evaluated with respect to learning outcomes and learning gains alongside a number of affective variables. Here we aim at a deeper understanding of the influence of MR on experimental…

We explored the mediating role of prior knowledge on the relation between intelligence and learning proportional reasoning. What students gain from formal instruction may depend on their intelligence, as well as on prior encounters with proportional concepts. We investigated whether a basic curriculum unit on the concept of density promoted…

This paper explores the integration of STEM activities in teaching and learning, emphasizing the importance of innovative pedagogical approaches in effectively introducing theoretical concepts, such as variables and functions, and merging them with practical applications. Drawing on existing literature, this study investigates the integration of…

A detailed characteristic of teaching and learning approaches used within the new concept of Learning by Being (LBB) is given. The evolution of educational paradigms from Learning by Doing (LBD) and Learning by Understanding (LBU) toward LBB is analyzed. The basic idea of LBB is students' ownership on cognitive goals, or the assumption of learning…

Jim Greer and his colleagues argued that student modelling is essential to provide adaptive instruction in tutoring systems and showed that effective modelling is possible, despite being enormously challenging. Student modelling plays a prominent role in many intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that address problem-solving domains. However,…

Mathematics is of major importance in science subjects. Unfortunately, students struggle with applying mathematics in science subjects, especially physics. In this qualitative study we demonstrate that transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics in physics class can be improved by using pre-knowledge effectively. We designed shift-problems…

In this paper, we applied a number of clustering algorithms on pretest data collected from 264 high-school students. Students took the pre-test at the beginning of a 5-week experiment in which they interacted with an intelligent tutoring system. The primary goal of this work is to identify clusters of students exhibiting similar knowledge…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This manuscript discusses how learning theories have been applied to shape multiple aspects of the design of curricular activities combining interactive computer simulations and University of Washington style tutorials (so-called simulation-tutorials).…

Despite difficulties understanding the dynamics of complex systems only simple dynamical systems without feedback connections have been taught in secondary school physics. Consequently, students do not have opportunities to develop intuition of temporal development of systems, whose dynamics are conditioned by the influence of feedback processes.…

This case study provides an explanatory account on the underachievement of three gifted students studying physics in a Taiwanese university. The students' physics underachievement was diagnosed by Sato's student-problem analysis chart. These students were invited to complete a questionnaire and a follow-up interview in order to (1) understand the…

Abstraction is one of the methods for learning knowledge with using mental processes that cannot be obtained through experiment and observation. RBC model that is based on abstraction in the process of creating knowledge is directly related to mental processes. In this study, the RBC model is used for the high school students' processes of…

A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We…

Numerical problem solving in classical mechanics in university physics education offers a learning situation where students have many possibilities of control and creativity. In this study, expertlike beliefs about physics and learning physics together with prior knowledge were the most important predictors of the quality of performance of a task…