Engineering design practice has been recognized as an effective approach to engage students in STEM learning. However, we noticed that students who possessed strong STEM knowledge did not necessarily perform well on their design projects. Thus, this study sought to explore factors that shaped students' design objectives and means. A design-based…

In the architectural design process, built precedent can be a valuable resource to shape design situations. Typology, the systematic categorisation of precedent, may act as a means to interpret this information and identify relationships between existing buildings and new design. This work explores the link between typology and the design process…

Understanding the spatial nature of the world is necessary in everyday life. Not only do people move about in 3D space, but spatial thinking is also important in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This may be especially true in the geosciences, where learners often encounter unique spatial reasoning…

In December 2017, a highly critical report entitled Bald Beginnings was prepared by the early years association TACTYC in response to Bold Beginnings, Ofsted's latest (2017) bulletin on early years practice. In a subsequent meeting with early years leaders, Ofsted proposed that Bold Beginnings should be seen as one component in a set of…

Epistemic cognition, defined as the ways that people acquire, justify, and use knowledge, has been a prominent area of scholarship in educational psychology for nearly 50 years. Researchers have argued that epistemic cognition is a key predictor of many 21st century learning outcomes including critical thinking, scientific literacy, and historical…

Practices of generating, analyzing, and using evidence play a central role in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS. However, the construct of evidence remains largely underspecified in these documents, providing insufficient guidance on how to engage students with the broad and complex nature of evidentiary reasoning. This creates…

The goal of this study was to identify and understand the mental models developed by 67 high school biology students as they learn about the human body as a complex system. Using concept maps, it sought to find an external way of representing how students organize their ideas about the human body system in their minds. We conducted a qualitative…

Research on learning progressions has led to advances in understanding student learning about big ideas in science, but teachers struggle to leverage the full potential of learning progressions for classroom instruction. Because learning progressions lay out how students' ideas change over a long period of time, learning progressions could help…

Need for cognitive closure refers to the need to reach a precise knowledge instead of confusion and ambiguity on a subject and the desire to make a decision as soon as possible. The purpose of the present research is to adapt the "15-item version of the Need for Closure Scale" developed by Roets and Van Hiel to Turkish and testing the…

Design thinking is a collaborative problem solving and human-centric approach that fosters innovation by elevating participants' creative thinking abilities. Design thinking techniques and practices have been implemented into different curricula in secondary and post-secondary education to address the need for new skills to be learned for the…

To engage in discussions of artwork meaning is to engage in critical reasoning, a factor that is central to the interpretation of artworks in the art classroom. While this may appear as a common-sense claim that reflects the tacit assumptions most art educators have about students' critical dispositions in art, it is also evident that little is…

The understanding and generalisation of causality are important thinking abilities, as they form the basis for a person's activity. Researchers exploring these abilities do not have a unified opinion regarding the age of children when they develop causative understanding and its determinant factors (e.g. age, prior knowledge, the content of a…

Even though student questioning is the key aspect of inquiry learning, students ask very few questions in Science classrooms. This research aimed to increase the number of high-level questions posed by primary students during science lessons. An experiment was designed in which the experimental group was taught about the taxonomy of questions that…

The concept of project-based learning (PBL) has garnered wide support among a number of K-12 education policy advocates and funders. PBL is viewed as an approach that enables students to develop the "21st century competencies"--cognitive and socioemotional skills--needed for success in college and careers. This issue focus, pulling from…

How children play around with new numerical concepts can provide important information about the structure and patterns they notice in number systems. In this chapter, we report on data from 243 second graders who were asked to fill in missing numbers on a number path (encouraging them to play around with numbers less than zero) and to solve…