The study aims to define the processes of pre-service mathematics teachers in reaching spatial visualisation generalisations within the context of drawing surface nets of solids. Two theories, Polya's problem-solving steps and novice-to-expert problem-solving schemas, were used as reference frameworks to describe the participants' spatial…

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…

Existing research demonstrates that pre-decisional information sampling strategies are often stable within a given person while varying greatly across people. However, it remains largely unknown what drives these individual differences, that is, why in some circumstances we collect information more idiosyncratically. In this brief report, we…

Tentativeness is often framed as a deficit, synonymous with timidity or a lack of confidence. In this article, I situate the notion of tentativeness in an enactivist framework and describe its role as both a strategy and affordance in a spatial visualization exercise. Drawing on insights from mathematics education and ecological psychology, I…

Lockwood has argued that taking a set-oriented perspective is critical for successful combinatorial enumeration. To date, however, the research literature has not yet captured the cognitive processes involved in taking such a perspective. In this theoretical paper, we elaborate the constructs of spatial structuring and spatial-numerical linked…

In light of the known visuoperceptual strengths and altered language skills in autism, we investigated the impact of problem content (semantic/visuospatial) combined with complexity and presence of lures on fluid reasoning in 43 autistic and 41 typical children (6-13 years old). Increased complexity and presence of lures diminished performance,…

Why do people shift their strategies for solving problems? Past work has focused on the roles of contextual and individual factors in explaining whether people adopt new strategies when they are exposed to them. In this study, we examined a factor not considered in prior work: people's evaluations of the strategies themselves. We presented…

This theoretical article explores the affordances and challenges of Euler diagrams as tools for supporting undergraduate introduction-to-proof students to make sense of, and reason about, logical implications. To theoretically frame students' meaning making with Euler diagrams, we introduce the notion of logico-spatial linked structuring (or…

Effective learning in chemistry education requires students to understand visual representations across multiple conceptual levels. Essential to this process are visuospatial skills which enable students to interpret and manipulate these representations effectively. These abilities allow students to construct mental models that support problem…

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…

This article discusses a set of tasks that introduce dilations using nonstandard figures, incorporating snippets of classroom conversations as students try to make sense of the specified tasks, to show how they progress in their understanding. The authors provide a theoretical foundation for the tasks and discuss the pedagogical implications for…

The hundreds chart is a valuable tool for teachers in elementary mathematics classrooms. The present study investigated the effects of spatial configurations of virtual hundreds charts on children's knowledge of base-ten concepts. Kindergarten and first-grade students were assigned to three instructional conditions in which they worked with a…

Tangible programming tools have become a mainstream teaching aid in gamification programming learning (GPL) due to their interactivity and ability to enhance novice learners' computational thinking and spatial reasoning skills. However, comparing the relative efficacy of different programming tools that simultaneously support these skills was not…

In this article, we present an educational proposal designed to work on spatial geometry and three-dimensional thinking with students in the last years of Primary Education. The proposal is comprised of several activities that combine the use of a classroom videogame and working with manipulative materials to create a representation of the…

Why do people shift their strategies for solving problems? Past work has focused on the roles of contextual and individual factors in explaining whether people adopt new strategies when they are exposed to them. In this study, we examined a factor not considered in prior work: people's evaluations of the strategies themselves. We presented…