Experimentation is one of the important strategies used in engineering design to understand the relationship between relevant variables so that they can be manipulated to generate optimized solution for a particular problem or design. The understanding of students' experimentation strategies allows educators to help students improve their design…

Educational robotics (ER) is an innovative learning tool that offers students opportunities to develop higher-order thinking skills. This study investigates the development of students' metacognitive (MC) and problem-solving (PS) skills in the context of ER activities, implementing different modes of guidance in two student groups (11-12 years…

In this study, we investigated how students used a drawing tool to visualize their ideas of chemical reaction processes. We interviewed 30 students using thinking-aloud and retrospective methods and provided them with a drawing tool. We identified four types of connections the students made as they used the tool: drawing on existing knowledge,…

Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

Betty's Brain is a computer-based learning environment that capitalizes on the social aspects of learning. In Betty's Brain, students instruct a character called a Teachable Agent (TA) which can reason based on how it is taught. Two studies demonstrate the "protege effect": students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do…