This study examined the development of flexibility and abstraction in preschool children by using a newly designed Pattern Completion Task (PCT) and the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST). In the PCT, children were presented with an incomplete pattern consisting of different-colored shapes and were asked to select the colored shape that…

We examined how middle school students reason about results from a computer-simulated die-tossing experiment, including various representations of data, to support or refute an assumption that the outcomes on a die are equiprobable. We used students' actions with the software and their social interactions to infer their expectations and whether or…

As teachers of political theory, our goal is not merely to help students understand the abstract reasoning behind key ideas and texts of our discipline. We also wish to convey the historical contexts that informed these ideas and texts, including the political aims of their authors. But the traditional lecture-and-discussion approach tends to…

This study characterizes how a cohort of 33 middle and secondary mathematics preservice teachers' inferential reasoning changed while enrolled in a statistics course designed for future teachers. Changes in inferential reasoning from pre- to post-assessments are analyzed and further elucidated by midcourse clinical interviews conducted with a…

Adult developmental mathematics students often work under great pressure to complete the mathematics sequences designed to help them achieve success (Bryk & Treisman, 2010). Results of a teaching experiment demonstrate how the ability to reason can be impeded by flaws in students' mental representations of mathematics. The earnestness of the…

Developmental predictors of children's fraction concepts and procedures at the end of fourth grade were investigated in a 2-year longitudinal study. Participants were 357 children who started the study in third grade. Attentive behavior, language, nonverbal reasoning, number line estimation, calculation fluency, and reading fluency each…

Prior research has established an executive function advantage among bilinguals as compared to monolingual peers. These non-linguistic cognitive advantages are largely assumed to result from the experience of managing two linguistic systems. However, the possibility remains that the relationship between bilingualism and executive function is…

Children's reasoning about the willingness of peers to convey accurate positive and negative performance feedback to others was investigated among a total of 179 6- to 11-year-olds from the USA and China. In Study 1, which was conducted in the USA only, participants responded that peers would be more likely to provide positive feedback than…

Development of reasoning is often depicted as involving increasing use of relational similarities and decreasing use of perceptual similarities ("the perceptual-to-relational shift"). We argue that this shift is a special case of a broader developmental trend: increasing sensitivity to the predictive accuracy of different similarity types. To test…

This article considers humanities teaching as a vital space where students might develop their capability as "practical reasoners". The importance of this for self-development, but also for society and democratic life, is considered, while the economic purposes which currently dominate higher education are critiqued. An example is taken from the…

The present research represents a test of the effect of adding seriation instruction to oddity instruction to produce an advantage in both forms of abstraction. Pasnak et al. (2007) and Kidd, Pasnak, Gadzichowski, Ferral-Like, & Gallington (2008) have shown that at risk kindergartners profit academically from instruction in both oddity and…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Results are reported from a study in which teachers' views of highly achieving ninth grade classes in Norway (KappAbel national competition winners) were compared with teachers' views of average achievement classes with regard to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and pedagogical practices. The main purpose of the study…

Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining…

A game is a set of activities involving one or more players. It has goals, constraints, payoffs, and consequences. A game is rule-guided and artificial in some respects. (Richard Wilson, 2010). According to Garris et al. (2002), define educational game play as "voluntary, nonproductive, and separate from the real world"; and they found…