Analyzing and interpreting student thinking through written work is a key, often challenging, practice of teaching. It entails noticing students' mathematical thinking and drawing on mathematical knowledge for teaching. This study investigates how pre-service secondary teachers at the beginning of their preparation reason about students' written…

Cognitive load theory has challenged contemporary approaches to teaching by arguing that they are ineffective because of a neglect of the psychology underpinning learning and, specifically, the high demand placed on working memory. This paper challenges the presuppositions involved not only in arguments for guided instruction by those supporting…

Meta-analysis of 2 × 2 tables is common and useful in research topics including analysis of adverse events and survey research data. Fixed-effects inference typically centers on measures of association such as the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistic or Woolf's estimator, but relies on assuming exact homogeneity across studies, which is often…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) is widely used in assessment and evaluation of educational and psychological tests. It models the individual response patterns by specifying functional relationship between individuals' multiple latent traits and their responses to test items. One major challenge in parameter estimation in MIRT is that…

This article reviews important statistical methods for estimating the impact of interventions on outcomes in education settings, particularly programs that are implemented in field, rather than laboratory, settings. We begin by describing the causal inference challenge for evaluating program effects. Then four research designs are discussed that…

Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data and the explicit or implicit causal conclusions are sometimes misstated. The link between the causal…

Evaluating blocked randomized experiments from a potential outcomes perspective has two primary branches of work. The first focuses on larger blocks, with multiple treatment and control units in each block. The second focuses on matched pairs, with a single treatment and control unit in each block. These literatures not only provide different…

In an experimental design, we investigated how fifth-grade readers use morphological and contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words, and to what extent this is related to their cognitive and linguistic skills. A group of 166 fifth-grade Dutch children (59 L1, 107 L2) performed a lexical inferencing task in which the availability…

The present study investigates teacher diagnostic skills when observing student engagement and inferring to underlying student characteristic profiles. Five student profiles as empirically determined in previous studies are selected: three incoherent (overestimating, uninterested, and underestimating) and two coherent (strong and struggling)…

In statistical inference, importance of sampling is recognized as one of its key concepts, which has allowed its incorporation internationally in different curricular guidelines and specifically in the Chilean curriculum, since the first notions of sampling are introduced in 7th Grade. This paper presents an analysis of the responses to an…

Background: Reading and writing are both fundamental activities for successful learning. However, little is known about the effect of reading comprehension performance on writing, as well as the pedagogical guidelines that can be drawn from this influence. Method: Thus, the purpose of the present investigation was to examine the influence of…

Human one-on-one coaching involves complex multimodal interactions. Successful coaching requires teachers to closely monitor students' cognitive-affective states and provide support of optimal type, timing, and amount. However, most of the existing human tutoring studies focus primarily on verbal interactions and have yet to incorporate the rich…

Analogy is a powerful tool for fostering conceptual understanding and transfer in STEM and other fields. Well-constructed analogical comparisons focus attention on the causal-relational structure of STEM concepts, and provide a powerful capability to draw inferences based on a well-understood source domain that can be applied to a novel target…

Among current state-of-art estimation methods for multilevel IRT models, the two-stage divide-and-conquer strategy has practical advantages, such as clearer definition of factors, convenience for secondary data analysis, convenience for model calibration and fit evaluation, and avoidance of improper solutions. However, various studies have shown…