The goal of this study was to explore the educational potential of Minecraft. This project was conducted with 118 elementary-school students from Canada during the 2016-2017 school year. To explore the educational potential of Minecraft on the students, we designed a "Minecraft challenge" for students. 10 game levels of ascending…

Solving mathematics story problems requires text comprehension skills. However, previous studies have found few connections between traditional measures of text readability and performance on story problems. We hypothesized that recently developed measures of readability and topic incidence measured by text-mining tools may illuminate associations…

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no…

Contemporary office work is becoming increasingly challenging as many routine tasks are automated or outsourced. The remaining problem solving activities may also offer potential for lifelong learning in the workplace. In this study, we analyzed problem solving in an office work setting using an Internet-based, semi-standardized diary to collect…

The aim of this study was to determine the salient beliefs of pre-service primary school teachers (PPSTs) about why they like or dislike physics and to explore whether these beliefs predict their teaching beliefs about physics. A total of 267 PPSTs (Male = 137, Female = 130) participated in the study. Qualitative data analyses were used and the…

Understanding how students translate between mathematical representations is of both practical and theoretical importance. This study examined students' processes in their generation of symbolic and graphic representations of given polynomial functions. The purpose was to investigate how students perform these translations. The result of the study…

A whirlwind of activity surrounds the topic of teaching and learning mathematics. The driving forces are a combination of changes in assessment and advances in technology that are being spurred on by the introduction of content in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice. Although the issues are certainly complex, the same forces…

Cognitively demanding tasks (CDT) (Stein et al. 2000) are necessary for the development of students' mathematical reasoning skills. Research is unequivocal on the importance of giving students opportunities to engage in such tasks. Although current reform efforts call for mathematics learning for "all" students, learners who…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is a national focus. Engineering education, as part of STEM education, needs to adapt to meet the needs of the nation in a rapidly changing world. Using computer-based visualization tools and corresponding 3D printed physical objects may help nontraditional students succeed in…

Proportional reasoning is important for informed decisions in proportional problem situations. This paper reports on mathematical content knowledge related to proportional reasoning of second-year, pre-service teachers. Responses to two ratio items provide insights into their correct method of solutions and common misconceptions. Anchor Points…

This paper examines how team creativity can be developed using the Synectics creative problem-solving approach by taking stickiness into account. Stickiness represents the difficulty learners experience in internalising knowledge and skills to perform a task productively. Using a quasi-experimental design learners' perceived change in team…

Teacher nominations of students are commonly used in gifted and talented identification systems to supplement psychometric measures of reasoning ability. In this study, second grade teachers were requested to nominate approximately one fourth of their students as having high learning potential in the year prior to the students' participation in a…

This dataset includes a series of 30 education-related majors' performance measures before and after they completed a 10-hour video game practice in a computer lab. The goal of the experimental study was to examine the effects of action video gaming on students' mathematics performance and mathematics anxiety as mediated by the effect of attention…

This paper reports a qualitative research that identifies Mexican high school students' social representations of mathematics. For this purpose, the social representations of "mathematics", "learning mathematics" and "teaching mathematics" were identified in a group of 50 students. Focus group interviews were carried…

Though factors contributing to difficulty in learning school subjects including Mathematics were extensively studied, nature and characteristics of mathematics, possibly, one among the foremost causes for difficulty in learning it has not received required attention. To bring attention to the difficulties arising out of the nature of mathematics…