Play has been traditionally recognized as an activity within early childhood education, but in actuality, it has substantial importance to learners at all levels. Since the idea of play is abstract and has no pre-determined outcomes, some teachers feel uneasy about allowing students to play with concepts and materials, especially with the advent…

Engaging students in inquiry-based learning is viewed by the science education community as the cornerstone of science education reform. Pre-service teachers often enter science methods courses in teacher education credential programs with significant trepidation of science, a lack of strong science content knowledge, a lack of confidence in…

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical…

Providing exploratory activities prior to explicit instruction can facilitate learning. However, the level of guidance provided during the exploration has largely gone unstudied. In this study, we examined the effects of 1 form of guidance, feedback, during exploratory mathematics problem solving for children with varying levels of prior domain…

A key learning outcome in problem-solving domains is the development of flexible knowledge, where learners know multiple strategies and adaptively choose efficient strategies. Two interventions hypothesized to improve flexibility in problem solving were experimentally evaluated: prompts to discover multiple strategies and direct instruction on…

Our aim is to describe open-ended case studies for learning real-life problem solving skills, and relate this approach to conventional, closed-ended decision case studies. Teaching methods are open-ended cases in agroecology, an alternative to traditional strategies that lead students through prepared materials and structured discussions to…

Argumentation is a process that occurs often in ill-defined domains and that helps deal with the ill-definedness. Typically a notion of "correctness" for an argument in an ill-defined domain is impossible to define or verify formally because the underlying concepts are open-textured and the quality of the argument may be subject to discussion or…

In the monograph The Math Teacher (following the Third International Scientific Colloquium Mathematics and Children in 2011), the term "teacher" designates a person who teaches mathematics, and the context of each article reveals whether this implies the teacher at a pre-school institution, a school or a university instructor. In…

The author builds on arguments he has made elsewhere that good commercial video games foster deep learning and problem solving and that such games in fact promote mastery as a form of play. Here he maintains that some good video games engage players with an important type of play, namely of play as discovery, of play as surmising new possibilities…

The authors of this article introduce students in their department's construction course to a variety of energy-saving practices and processes. They describe activities that could give students an opportunity to apply design methodology in the creative pursuit of a solution to an open-ended problem. An introductory lecture gives students the…

A WebQuest is an inquiry-based lesson plan that uses the Internet. This article explains what a WebQuest is, shows how to create one, and provides an example. When engaged in a WebQuest, students use technology to experience cooperative learning and discovery learning while honing their research, writing, and presentation skills. It has been found…

There has been a dearth of studies on teacher educators using action research to improve their own practice. This book is the first systematic study of a group of teachers examining and enhancing their own practice through the inquiry process of action research. This book presents a broad overview of a variety of methodologies that can be used to…

Many innovative approaches to education such as problem-based learning (PBL) and inquiry learning (IL) situate learning in problem-solving or investigations of complex phenomena. Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) grouped these approaches together with unguided discovery learning. However, the problem with their line of argument is that IL and…

This article presents an instructional approach to constructing discovery-oriented activities. The cornerstone of the approach is a systematically asked question "If a mathematical statement under consideration is plausible, but wrong anyway, how can one fix it?" or, in brief, "If not, what yes?" The approach is illustrated with examples from…

Research shows that mathematically gifted students learn differently from their same age group peers. They require curriculum to be differentiated to meet their specific learning styles (Johnson, 2000). Studies have shown that formal instruction in elementary school classrooms often lacks challenge for the gifted learner since courses in regular…