Feedback loop reasoning is an essential part of systems thinking, which includes the analysis and description of system behaviour and regulative measures. In feedback loops, every change can simultaneously represent a cause and an effect. Research on reasoning in feedback loops is limited to investigating students' existing mental models. This…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

In this paper, we extend our previous work on challenges teachers face when engaging with proportional reasoning contexts to investigate two contexts that included four problems for middle grades teachers to solve as well as eight student solutions. Analysis included coding for correct solving of the problem as well as making sense of and…

Design within primary and secondary schools has been increasingly emphasized over the past decade. As a response to this increased interest, qualitative research examining students' cognitive processes involved in the practices of design has been on the rise. These studies have commonly employed the concurrent think-aloud research methodology to…

This study focuses on proportional division, a specific problem type of proportions and proportional relationships, which embeds a part-part-whole relationship. We investigated how students in grades 6 to 9 solved and perceived three proportional division problems. Analysis of the students' performance on the tasks revealed three types of…

Student insight into algebraic formulas, including the ability to identify the structure of a formula and its components and to reason with and about formulas, is an issue in mathematics education. In this study, we investigated how 16- and 17-year-old pre-university students' insight into algebraic formulas can be promoted through graphing…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Stimulating thinking related to mathematical content is the focus of many tasks in the mathematics classroom. Beyond such content-related thinking, promoting forms of higher order thinking is among the goals of mathematics instruction as well. So-called hybrid tasks focus on combining both goals: they aim at fostering mathematical thinking and…

This study considers the role and nature of co-thought gestures when students process map-based mathematics tasks. These gestures are typically spontaneously produced silent gestures which do not accompany speech and are represented by small movements of the hands or arms often directed toward an artefact. The study analysed 43 students (aged…

The study explores the development of 11-year-old students' informal inference about random bunny hops through student talk and use of computer simulation tools. Our aim in this paper is to draw on dialogic theory to explain how students make shifts in perspective, from intuition-based reasoning to more powerful, formal ways of using probabilistic…

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…

This study examines epistemic thinking in action in order to shed light on the relation between students' personal epistemologies and their online learning practices. The study is based on observations of the learning behaviors of 6th-grade students (n = 38) during two online inquiry tasks. Data were collected through think-aloud protocols and…

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…

The purpose of this study is to apply the attribute hierarchy method (AHM) to a sample of SAT algebra items administered in March 2005. The AHM is a psychometric method for classifying examinees' test item responses into a set of structured attribute patterns associated with different components from a cognitive model of task performance. An…

Proposes the use of procedural task analysis as a tool to assess a person's mental processes during problem solving in science education research. Uses transcriptions of videotape or audiotape problem-solving sessions to identify students' knowledge structures and misconceptions. (MDH)