This study examines expressions of reasoning by some higher achieving 11 to 18 year-old English students responding to a survey consisting of function tasks developed in collaboration with their teachers. We report on 70 students, 10 from each of English years 7-13. Iterative and comparative analysis identified capabilities and difficulties of…

This paper describes an emerging approach to the design of task sequences and the theory that undergirds it. The approach aims at promoting particular mathematical concepts, understood as the result of reflective abstraction. Central to this approach is the identification of available student activities from which students can abstract the…

Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Research in physics education has contributed substantively to improvements in the learning and teaching of university physics by informing the development of research-based instructional materials for physics courses. Reports on the design of these…

This research study explored robotics as the catalyst for computational thinking (CT) by sixth-grade students as they are engaged in a science lesson. The interactions, understandings, and applications are discussed, along with the participants' connections and implementations of CT concepts (decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition, and…

Checklists that focus attention on key variables might allow clinicians to find and fix their mistakes. However, whether this approach can be applied to clinicians of varying degrees of expertise is unclear. Novice and expert clinicians vary in their predominant reasoning processes and in the types of errors they commit. We studied 44 clinicians…

Reasoning, our ability to solve novel problems, has been shown to improve as a result of learning experiences. However, the underlying mechanisms of change in this high-level cognitive ability are unclear. We hypothesized that possible mechanisms include improvements in the encoding, maintenance, and/or integration of relations among mental…

It is commonly accepted in the academy that developing a critical thinking capacity and related capabilities will make students more effective thinkers and writers, and that these are desirable traits for graduates to have no matter what path they take after graduation. While most academics agree that critical thinking is an essential component of…

Systems and system models are recognized as a crosscutting concept in the newly released framework for K-12 science education (NRC [National Research Council], 2012). In previous work, I developed a learning progression for systemic reasoning in ecology at the elementary level. The learning progression captured five levels of students' reasoning…

The paper focuses on student-teachers' geometric diagrams to mediate the emergence of different proofs for a geometric proposition. For Peirce, a diagram is an icon that explicitly and implicitly represents the deep structural relations among the parts of the object that it stands for. Geometric diagrams can be seen as epistemological tools to…

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined included general reading difficulties, defined by low word reading and reading comprehension, and specific-reading comprehension difficulties, defined…

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined included general reading difficulties, defined by low word reading and reading comprehension, and specific-reading comprehension difficulties, defined…

We investigated "scalar implicature" in adolescents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to test whether theory of mind deficits associated with autism affect pragmatic inferences in language. We tested scalar implicature computation in adolescents with ASD (12-18 years) and asked whether they reason about mental states when…

Detecting a pattern within a sequence of ordered units, defined as patterning, is a cognitive ability that is important in learning mathematics and influential in learning to read. The present study was designed to examine relations between first-grade children's executive functions, patterning, and reading abilities, and to examine whether these…

This paper presents a conceptual analysis for students' images of graphs and their extension to graphs of two-variable functions. We use the conceptual analysis, based on quantitative and covariational reasoning, to construct a hypothetical learning trajectory (HLT) for how students might generalize their understanding of graphs of…