School policies and practices have historically lent themselves to disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates based on students' race, gender, and disability. The disparity between racial minorities, particularly Black males, and their White peers has generated concern from various stakeholders. Using Kingdon's ("Agendas, alternatives,…

Working with language-independent logic structures can help students develop both inductive and deductive reasoning skills. The Japanese publisher Nikoli (with resources available both in print and online) produces a treasure trove of language-independent logic puzzles. The Nikoli print resources are mostly in Japanese, creating the extra…

The task shared in this article provides geometry students with opportunities to recall and use basic geometry vocabulary, extend their knowledge of area relationships, and create area formulas. It is characterized by reasoning and sense making (NCTM 2009) and the "Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others"…

It is commonly assumed that belief-based reasoning is fast and automatic, whereas rule-based reasoning is slower and more effortful. Dual-Process theories of reasoning rely on this speed-asymmetry explanation to account for a number of reasoning phenomena, such as base-rate neglect and belief-bias. The goal of the current study was to test this…

The article analyzes contrasting theories about the role of emotion in learning proposed by Alfred North Whitehead and Jerome Bruner. I argue that Whitehead's account of experience and emotion in his educational philosophy is best understood in the context of the philosophy of organism. Here he takes issue with the empiricists' view that sensa are…

We present a design study developed in an Italian school. Taking inspiration from the work of the Russian psychologist V. V. Davydov, we have reformulated some activities of his curriculum for the first grade, in order to adapt them to a didactic project for a fifth grade class. In the paper we firstly expose our theoretical assumptions and the…

Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co-construction (KCC) has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive…

Mathematical sense-making--looking for coherence between the structure of the mathematical formalism and causal or functional relations in the world--is a core component of physics expertise. Some physics education research studies have explored what mathematical sense-making looks like at the introductory physics level, while some historians and…

Purpose: According to Vygotskian theory, verbal thinking serves to guide our behavior and underpins critical self-regulatory functions. Indeed, numerous studies now link inner speech usage with performance on tests of executive function (EF). However, the selectivity of inner speech contributions to multifactorial executive planning performance…

In this paper I intend to illustrate Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and then extend the discussion to scaffolding and its relationship with the ZPD. This is then followed by some concerns raised in literature regarding scaffolding as a concept and as a metaphor which involves analysing the arguments for regarding the role of…

Conversations in collaborative problem-solving activities can be used to probe the collaboration skills of the team members. Annotating the conversations into different collaboration skills by human raters is laborious and time consuming. In this report, we report our work on developing an automated annotation system, CPS-rater, for conversational…

The present study is the first to examine the computation estimation skills of dyscalculics versus controls using the estimation comparison task. In this task, participants judged whether an estimated answer to a multidigit multiplication problem was larger or smaller than a given reference number. While dyscalculics were less accurate than…

We study here an aspect of an infinite set "P" of multivariate polynomials, the elements of which are associated with the arithmetic-geometric-mean inequality. In particular, we show in this article that there exist infinite subsets of probability "P" for which every element may be expressed as a finite sum of squares of real…

Organizations are faced with solving increasingly complex problems. Addressing these issues requires effective leadership that can facilitate a collaborative problem solving approach where multiple perspectives are leveraged. In this conceptual paper, we critique the effectiveness of earlier leadership models in tackling complex organizational…

This paper studies the cognitive obstacles related to one aspect of mathematization in physics problem-solving, namely, what might be called "structuring for mathematization," where the problem situation is structured in such a way that a translation to a mathematical universe can be done. We report the results of an analysis of four…