The aim of this research was to explore Australian high-school students' argumentation and informal reasoning about biotechnology. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Year-8 students (12-13 years old), 14 Year-10 students (14-15 years old) and 6 Year-12 students (16-17 years old) from six metropolitan high schools in Perth,…

Studies have suggested that professional learning is influenced by two key parameters, i.e., climate and planning, and their associated variables (mutual respect, collaboration, mutual trust, supportiveness, openness). In this paper, we applied analysis of the relationships between the proposed quantitative, fuzzy logic-based model and a series of…

Students have difficulties in physics because of the abstract nature of concepts and principles. One of the effective methods for overcoming students' difficulties is the use of analogies to visualize abstract concepts to promote conceptual understanding. According to Iding, analogies are consistent with the tenets of constructivist learning…

As China is believed to be the market of the twenty-first century, the aim of this cross-sectional analysis, which is based on a literature review, examines the divergence between two main clusters, China and the West. The author makes use of dialectic logic vs. formal logic, particularistic vs. universalistic culture and socialization vs.…

This article discusses the design of tasks for teacher education. It focuses on tasks that are used in a university course for pre-service secondary school mathematics teachers. Special attention is given to tasks that use analogical thinking in their construction or implementation. These tasks are categorized by type of teacher education goal and…

Conditionals in natural language are central to reasoning and decision making. A theoretical proposal called the Ramsey test implies the conditional probability hypothesis: that the subjective probability of a natural language conditional, P(if p then q), is the conditional subjective probability, P(q [such that] p). We report three experiments on…

Reasoning and learning are closely related, both being the methods of solving problems, learning usually results from the process of reasoning. All inventions, discoveries, art, literature and advances in culture and civilization are based on thinking, reasoning and problem solving capacity of human being. A sound reasoning leads to better…

The author of this paper submits the thesis that learning requires doing; only through inquiry is learning achieved, and hence this paper proposes a programme of use of a modified Moore method in a Probability and Mathematical Statistics (PAMS) course sequence to teach students PAMS. Furthermore, the author of this paper opines that set theory…

Introduction: Pupils reasoning ability is a sine-qua-non to the evaluation of their performance in learning and an indicator of their potential predictors of future performance. Method: The study examined the relationship among demographic variables and reasoning ability of primary school pupils. It drew four hundred pupils from ten (10)…

An initial sample of 94 students enrolled in a first-term general chemistry course was tested with paired algorithmic-conceptual questions, which included questions first used by Nurrenbern and Pickering. The topics of these questions were density, stoichiometry, gas laws, and molarity. Scientific reasoning skill was measured with the Classroom…

The aims of this study were considered under three headings. The first was to elicit misconception that science and physics student teachers (pre-service teachers) had about the terms, "inertial mass", "gravitational mass", "gravity", "gravitational force" and "weight". The second was to understand how prior learning affected their misconceptions,…

This study attempts to uncover the beliefs regarding various aspects of creativity among trainee-teachers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Trainee-teachers from Hong Kong (N = 188) and Singapore (N = 127) completed a questionnaire on beliefs about creativity. The 30-item questionnaire covering 15 aspects of beliefs regarding creativity was presented to…

Emotional and parent-based reasoning refer to the tendency to rely on personal or parental anxiety response information rather than on objective danger information when estimating the dangerousness of a situation. This study investigated the prospective relationships of emotional and parent-based reasoning with anxiety symptoms in a sample of…

This study focused on unprompted changes in children's analogical reasoning on geometric tasks and the additional effect of a short training procedure. Participants were 36 grade 1 level children (M = 6;8 years) divided over a not-trained and a trained condition. The study was a 5-sessions migrogenetic procedure, with a follow-up test session…

Researchers have examined inductive reasoning to identify different cognitive processes when participants deal with inductive problems. This article presents a prescriptive theory of inductive reasoning that identifies cognitive processing using a procedural strategy for making comparisons. It is hypothesized that training in the use of the…