Most research on the creative process has focused on idea generation, and the prevalence and influence of many other creative subprocesses remain poorly understood. To clarify different subprocesses' respective roles in creative work, this study investigated their frequencies and associations with creativity-related personal characteristics and…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

A central practice in the discipline of organic chemistry is the ability to solve certain fundamental problems, including predicting reactivity, proposing mechanisms, and designing syntheses. These problems are encountered frequently by both students and practitioners, who need to utilize vast amounts of content knowledge in specific ways to…

Background: A solid conceptual understanding is essential for students to succeed in all academic disciplines. Student misconceptions are correlated with their poor academic performance and high attrition rates. It is especially important to correct student misconceptions in science-based undergraduate engineering mechanics courses that cover…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

This study aimed to analyze second-semester organic chemistry students' problem-solving strategies, specifically focusing on the resources activated while solving problems on E2, E1, and E1cB elimination reactions. Using the theoretical framework by Elby and Hammer, we defined a resource as a unit of information used in the problem-solving…

The demands of learning in the twenty-first century require being skilled in the use and comprehension of multiple documents. Some individual factors such as the metacognitive skill of theory of mind (ToM) are related to this ability. This study investigated the relationship between university students' ability to comprehend multiple documents,…

Combining mathematical and physical understanding in reasoning is difficult, and a growing body of research shows that students experience problems with the combination of physics and mathematics in reasoning beyond the introductory level. We investigated students' reasoning about boundary conditions (BCs) for the diffusion equation by conducting…

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…

Expert judgement has been frequently employed with reading assessments to gauge the skills potentially measured by test tasks, for purposes such as construct validation or producing diagnostic information. Despite the critical role it plays in such endeavours, few studies have triangulated its results with other types of data such as reported…

Efforts to promote disciplinary literacy can help students integrate knowledge with ways of doing and being within disciplinary settings. Yet, effectively facilitating disciplinary literacy, even within an upper-level undergraduate physics course like the one studied here, is surprisingly hard. This article qualitatively analyzes an instructor's…

Both graph comprehension and data analysis and interpretation are influenced by one's prior knowledge and experiences. To understand how one's prior knowledge and experiences interact with their analysis of a graph, we conducted think-aloud interviews with general chemistry students as they interpreted a graph to determine optimal conditions for…

Background: Both learning and problem solving are major goals of complex problem solving in engineering education. The order of knowledge construction and problem solving in learning through problem solving, however, has not been explained in current literature. Objectives: To understand their relationships, this study compared the effects of…

Textbooks have been the subject of research within and across disciplines, but have not yet been widely studied from a disciplinary literacy perspective. Readerly agency is also understudied in disciplinary literacy. The present paper aims to illuminate both of these areas by examining facets of agency that readers demonstrated during think-aloud…

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…