Remembered utility is the retrospective evaluation about the pleasure and pain associated with a past experience. It can influence choices about repeating or avoiding similar situations in the future (Kahneman, 2000). A set of 5 experiments explored the remembered utility of effortful test episodes and how it impacted future test choices.…

Traditionally, the subject of neuroscience has been one of the most difficult courses for medical students in undergraduate medical education. Over the last few decades, a fear of neurology and the neurosciences, termed neurophobia, has presented among medical students around the world. Today, neurophobia has resulted in medical students not…

This article demonstrates how to consider differentiating instruction for diverse learners while maintaining the cognitive demand of a mathematics task. The authors present scenarios involving hypothetical cases of students in inclusive classrooms who engaged in productive struggle within the differentiated task. The authors specifically focus on…

There have been mixed results in studies investigating proportional reasoning in young children. The current study aimed to examine whether providing visual scaling cues and structuring the reasoning process can improve proportional reasoning in 5- to 6-year-old children. In a series of computerized tasks, children compared the sweetness of 2…

This paper outlines a seven-step process for developing problem-solving tasks informed by cognitive load theory. Through an example of a task developed for Year 2 students, we show how this approach can be used to produce challenging mathematical tasks that aim to optimise cognitive load for each student.

Solving non-routine problems is a key competence in a world full of changes, uncertainty and surprise where we strive to achieve so many ambitious goals. But the world is also full of solutions because of the extraordinary competences of humans who search for and find them. We must explore the world around us in a thoughtful way, acquire knowledge…

This study addresses the development and evaluation of the Physics Problem-Solving Taxonomy (PPST), comprising five levels: retrieval, diagnosis, strategy, conceptual, and creative thinking. The taxonomy draws on Bloom's revised taxonomy in the cognitive domain, the Types of Knowledge Taxonomy, and the Problem-Solving Taxonomy in engineering. The…

This study discusses the development of a basic electronics knowledge (BEK) assessment as a pretest activity for undergraduate students in engineering and related fields. The 28 BEK items represent 12 key concepts, including properties of serial circuits, knowledge of electrical laws (e.g., Kirchhoff 's and Ohm's laws), and properties of digital…

One of the primary skills required by mathematics teachers is the ability to provide effective explanations to their students. Using Kay's (2014) theory-based framework for creating instructional videos, this study explored the quality and growth of explanations embedded in mathematical instructional videos created by 37 pre-service teachers…

The aim of this study is to analyse how mathematical problem solving is represented in mathematical textbooks for Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis comprises dominating Swedish textbook series, and relates to uncovering (a) the quantity of tasks that are actually mathematical problems, (b) their location in the chapter, (c) their…

While the general planning advice offered to mathematics teachers seems to be to start with simple examples and build complexity progressively, the research reported in this article is a contribution to the body of literature that argues the reverse. That is, posing of appropriately complex tasks may actually prompt the use of more sophisticated…

In this article, we discuss the approach adopted within the Vanderbilt University Learning Disabilities Innovation Hub, which focuses on students with higher-order comorbidity: students with concurrent difficulty with reading comprehension and word-problem solving. The aim of the Hub's Research Project is to test what we refer to as the…

This study tested the hypothesis that exploratory learning, with and without analogous problems, would improve students' ability to make connections between conceptually-related topics. In this randomized experiment, undergraduates in introductory physics (N = 171) studied a new topic under three different instructional conditions. Order and type…

Learning, development, and response to instruction often involve changes in the strategies that learners use to solve problems. In this chapter, our focus is on mathematical problem solving in both children and adults. We offer a selective review of research on three classes of factors that may influence processes of strategy change in…

Subjective cognitive load (CL) rating scales are widely used in educational research. However, there are still some open questions regarding the point of time at which such scales should be applied. Whereas some studies apply rating scales directly after each step or task and use an average of these ratings, others assess CL only once after the…