Minimal research has been accumulated in the field of social studies education for Novakian concept mapping, yet there are many benefits from adding this learning tool to a teacher's instructional toolbox. The article defines Novakian concept mapping and invites readers to adopt digital Novakian concept mapping into the social studies classroom as…

Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an instructional practice for curriculum design, brims with the promise that concepts, however challenging, may be accessible to everyone in a classroom. There is no reason for anyone, including children in special education programs, not to have the right of passage into inquiry within a unit of study. To…

"Memorizing facts is boring. Drill-and-practice is boring. But thinking, for most students most of the time, is actually fun," writes Susan M. Brookhart. The author recommends that teachers build interest and engagement into every lesson plan by creating opportunities for deep thinking. She describes three strategies to accomplish this.…

Two hundred and eighty undergraduates from universities in two countries were asked to read didactic material, and then think and write about potential solutions to an ill-defined problem. The writing was conducted within a synchronous or asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment. Asynchronous CMC took the form of email…

This study investigates three aspects--university major, year, and institution type--in relation to student scientific reasoning. Students from three majors (science, engineering, and education), four year levels (years 1 through 4), and two tiers of Chinese universities (tiers 1 and 2) participated in the study. A large-scale written assessment…

Researchers point out the importance of teachers' knowledge of student thinking and the role of examining student work in various contexts to develop a knowledge base regarding students' ways of thinking. This study investigated prospective secondary mathematics teachers' interpretations of students' thinking as manifested in students' work that…

Kinematics is a topic students are unknowingly aware of well before entering the physics classroom. Students observe motion on a daily basis. They are constantly interpreting and making sense of their observations, unintentionally building their own understanding of kinematics before receiving any formal instruction. Unfortunately, when students…

For this study we considered the influence of binge drinking behavior in college on students' critical thinking gains. Findings suggest that binge drinking has a negative influence on students' critical thinking gains over 4 years of college and that this effect was driven by students with the lowest levels of precollege critical thinking. In both…

The main objective of this article is to offer an alternative discursive framework for teaching history and citizenship education in Québec, Canada. Enabling a more inclusive discussion around how citizenship is constructed, thinking interculturally allows us begin thinking about practical ways in which citizenship and history education might…

This article is the first in a new series of hands-on activities designed especially for early childhood students to encourage their natural curiosity and promote development of scientific thinking. The activity presented was created to help children learn how to make scientific observations using their senses. Children develop science inquiry…

Researchers all over the world unanimously agree upon the idea that teaching students to think critically is principal aim of all level education. The researchers observed as student and teacher that in Pakistani elementary public schools, teachers are overly emphasized the coverage of content through transferring factual information and rote…

This qualitative case study employed an existing framework (Chin, 2006) to examine teacher questioning strategies that promote students' higher-order thinking in science. The study explored the instruction of an experienced science teacher and a 10th grade Chemistry class that he taught in a Singapore school. Our methods included lesson…

The calculus concepts of concavity and inflection points are often given meaning through the shape or curvature of a graph. However, there appear to be deeper core ideas for these two concepts, though the research literature has yet to give explicit attention to what these core ideas might be or what it might mean to "understand" them.…

In this paper we examine the application of Tzur's (2007) fine-grained assessment to the design of an assessment measure of a particular multiplicative scheme so that non-interview, good enough data can be obtained (on a large scale) to infer into elementary students' reasoning. We outline three design principles that surfaced through our recent…

Many scientific theories and discoveries involve reasoning about extreme scales, removed from human experience, such as time in geology, size in nanoscience. Thus, understanding scale is central to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Unfortunately, novices have trouble understanding and comparing sizes of unfamiliar large and small…