The design process is full of judgment, especially around successes and failures that occur through each iteration. Decisions about how to proceed when ideas do not work can be especially challenging for beginning designers. Yet, experts are able to demonstrate more natural regulation of the process. This research focused on the experiences of…

Research on student thinking facilitates the design of instructional materials that build on student ideas. The pieces framework views student knowledge as consisting of independent pieces that students assemble in fluctuating ways based on the context at hand. This perspective affords important insights about the reasons students think the way…

In introductory computer programming courses, students experience a range of emotions. Students often experience anxiety and frustration when they encounter difficulties in writing programs. Continued frustration can discourage students from pursuing engineering and computing careers. Although prior research has shown how emotions affect students'…

Think-aloud interviews have been a valuable but underused tool in statistics education research. Think-alouds, in which students narrate their reasoning in real time while solving problems, differ in important ways from other types of cognitive interviews and related education research methods. Beyond the uses already found in the statistics…

This paper demonstrates the value of an innovative test preparation strategy, applied over multiple semesters to one principles of macroeconomics class. The professor makes a video of himself taking a copy of the test students are preparing for, talking aloud about how to think about the question and work through the solution. A natural experiment…

High attrition and dropout rates are common in introductory programming courses. One of the reasons students drop out is loss of motivation due to the lack of feedback and proper assessment of their progress. Hence, a process-oriented approach is needed in assessing programming progress, which entails examining and measuring students' compilation…

In this experiment we investigated whether the presentation of domain principles within one text facilitates reading to learn from multiple exemplar texts that feature the importance of the principles. There were five texts about natural selection: a principles text, which described principles of natural selection, and four exemplar-based texts…

Metacognition and self-regulation are important skills for successful learning and have been discussed and researched extensively in the general education literature for several decades. More recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how metacognitive and self-regulatory skills contribute to student success in the context of…

Emphasizing stoichiometry appears to be a norm of introductory chemistry courses. In this longitudinal and mixed-methods study, we examined how the emphasis on stoichiometry in assessments of introductory chemistry impacted educational equity and student learning. Using quantitative methods, we identified mole and stoichiometric conversions as two…

We studied the impact of metacognitive reflections on recently-completed work as a way to improve the retention of newly learned problem-solving techniques. Students video recorded themselves talking through problems immediately after finishing them, completed ongoing problem-solving strategy maps or problem-sorting exercises, and filled out…

Numerous Program Visualization tools (PVs) have been developed for assisting novice students to understand their source code further. However, none of them are practical to be used in the context of completing programming laboratory task; students are required to keep switching between PV and programming workspace since PV's features are…

We introduce a template to (i) scaffold the problem solving process for students in the physics 1 course, and (ii) serve as a generic rubric for measuring how expertlike students are in their problem solving. This template is based on empirical studies of the problem solving practices of expert scientists and engineers, unlike most existing…

The purpose of this study was to investigate bridging inferences and learning when students with low topic knowledge read multiple complementary biology texts. Using a think-aloud protocol, we assessed students' (n = 74) cognitive processes while they read one text about principles of natural selection and three texts about examples of natural…

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e.,…

This article addresses well-known and difficult problems involving reading comprehension and compliance in college courses, using a lower-level philosophy course as a case study. It draws upon both general and discipline-specific research in three promising areas for reading instruction: metacognition, modeling via "think-alouds," and…