This study examined how toddlers gain insights from source video displays and use the insights to solve analogous problems. Two- to 2.5-year-olds viewed a source video illustrating a problem-solving strategy and then attempted to solve analogous problems. Older but not younger toddlers extracted the problem-solving strategy depicted in the video…

The "National Science Education Standards" emphasize teaching unifying concepts and processes such as basic functions of living organisms, the living environment, and scale (NRC 2011). Scale includes understanding that different characteristics, properties, or relationships within a system might change as its dimensions are increased or decreased…

Reasoning about modesty was examined among adolescents and young adults in China and the U.S. Participants made moral judgments of story characters who did a good deed and either truthfully accepted credit for it, or falsely denied having done it. The social context in which statements occurred was manipulated, with some made in private and others…

This article explores the concepts of "critical questions" (from D. N. Walton, 1996) and "integrative" and "refutational argument stratagems" as an approach for teaching argumentation and critical thinking. A study was conducted for 6 months in 3 sections of a 7th-grade social studies classroom in which 30 students discussed and wrote about…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which six cognitive and attitudinal variables predicted pre-service elementary teachers' (N = 87) performance on line graphing. Predictors included reading comprehension and mathematics scores, logical thinking performance scores, as well as measures of attitudes toward science, mathematics…

Children are naturally curious and want to make sense of their world. To implement mathematical tasks that nurture children's desire to reason, it is valuable for teachers to have experienced for themselves comparable tasks and learning environments (Ball and Bass 2000). In this article, the author describes three strategies to facilitate…

The authors appreciate Professor Slotta's responding to their critique (Slotta, this issue). For their part, they believe that Professor Slotta has misinterpreted aspects of their position. In this commentary, the authors clarify two particular points. First, they explain their use of "static ontologies," which they maintain applies. Second, they…

The very early appearance of abstract knowledge is often taken as evidence for innateness. We explore the relative learning speeds of abstract and specific knowledge within a Bayesian framework and the role for innate structure. We focus on knowledge about causality, seen as a domain-general intuitive theory, and ask whether this knowledge can be…

Cultural theory is tentatively used to understand how far quality assessment affects institutions by influencing the group and grid dimensions. This paper argues that the self-assessment phase of the Portuguese system, in use until recently, promoted the egalitarian (logic of mistrusting power and expertise) and the individualist (logic of freedom…

It might be argued that quantitative and qualitative analyses are merely two alternative reflections of an overarching critical thinking. For instance, just as instructors of numeracy warn their charges to consider the construction of variables, teachers of qualitative approaches caution students to define terms. Similarly, an advocate of…

Cognitive scientists have studied internal cognitive structures, processes, and systems for decades in order to understand how they function in human learning. Nevertheless, questions concerning the diagnosis of changes in these cognitive structures while solving inductive reasoning tasks are still being scrutinized. This paper reports findings…

This study is set in the context of a Post Graduate course for Teacher Education where the participants were exposed to a systematic reflective learning strategy facilitated by a structured interactive e-learning platform. The e-platform was used for students to share, reflect and they had demonstration of skills in class. The researcher intended…

This study is aimed at investigating the relationships among students' relevant prior knowledge, meaningful learning orientation, reasoning ability, self-efficacy, locus of control, attitudes toward biology and achievement with the human circulatory system (HCS) using the learning cycle (LC) and the traditional classroom setting. The study was…

We investigated how students articulate uncertainty when they are engaged in structured scientific argumentation tasks where they generate, examine, and interpret data to determine the existence of exoplanets. In this study, 302 high school students completed 4 structured scientific arguments that followed a series of computer-model-based…

We describe a third-year undergraduate course that focuses on multiscale modeling and protein folding and has as its primary goal the encouragement of students to integrate thinking across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. The ability to perform innovative and successful research work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…