Students tend to learn genetics by rote and may not realise the interrelationships in daily life. Because reasoning abilities are necessary to construct relationships between concepts and rote learning impedes the students' sound understanding, it was predicted that having high level of formal reasoning and adopting meaningful learning orientation…

This comparative case study examines the manner in which 2 middle-level social studies teachers established connections between the past and the present within their curriculums. The teachers who participated in this project worked in different school districts: one teaching a 7th-grade U.S. History curriculum and the other teaching a 6th-grade…

This article introduces the "Data First" approach and shows how the observation and analysis of scientific data can be used as a scaffold to build conceptual understanding in chemistry through inductive reasoning. The "Data First" approach emulates the scientific process by changing the order by which we introduce data. Rather…

On the writing component of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th grade high school students' scores on argumentative tasks were lower than on tasks that required them to explain or to convey an experience ("National Assessment of Educational Progress," 2011). Similarly, 11th and 12th graders at the research…

We present an analysis of students' formal constructions in mathematics regarding to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The analyzed tasks correspond to students of the Course of Mathematics for the admission to the university. Our study was qualitative, consisted in the identification, analysis and interpretation, focused in logic…

Language is critical in the mediation of scientific reasoning, higher-order thinking and the development of scientific literacy. This study investigated how an exemplary primary science teacher scaffolds and supports students' reasoning during a Year 4 materials unit. Lessons captured on video, teacher and student interviews and micro-ethnographic…

This study reports on an analysis of students' textbook task-solving in Swedish upper secondary school. The relation between types of mathematical reasoning required, used, and the rate of correct task solutions were studied. Rote learning and superficial reasoning were common, and 80% of all attempted tasks were correctly solved using such…

Students with high incidence disabilities (i.e., specific learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, intellectual disability, etc.) exhibit impairments in the areas of attention, memory, perception, processing linguistic information, and reasoning that affects their ability to learn. Hence, the ability to design and deliver explicit, enhanced…

Between good intentions and great results lies a program theory--not just a list of tasks but a vision of what needs to happen, and how. Now widely used in government and not-for-profit organizations, program theory provides a coherent picture of how change occurs and how to improve performance. "Purposeful Program Theory" shows how to develop,…

In 2002, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch asserted that recursion may be the one aspect of the human language faculty that makes human language unique in the narrow sense--unique to language and unique to human beings. They also argue somewhat more quietly (as do Pinker and Jackendoff 2005) that recursion may be possible outside of language: navigation,…

Here is a technique for proving the fundamental theorems of analysis that provides a unified way to pass from local properties to global properties on the real line, just as ordinary induction passes from local implication (if true for "k", the theorem is true for "k" + 1) to a global conclusion in the natural numbers.

Previous research has consistently found that spontaneous analogical transfer is strongly tied to concrete and contextual similarities between the cases. However, that work has largely failed to acknowledge that the relevant factor in transfer is the similarity between individuals' mental representations of the situations rather than the overt…

Abstract reasoning refers to the ability to reason logically with premises that do not allow reference to knowledge about the real world. This form of reasoning is complex and difficult, and at the same time, it is critical for understanding science and mathematics. Two studies examined the use of analogy as a method to bridge reasoning with…

Discounting is a phenomenon in causal reasoning in which the presence of one cause casts doubt on another. We provide a survey of the descriptive and formal models that attempt to explain the discounting process and summarize what current models do not account for and where room for improvement exists. We propose a levels-of-analysis framework…

The existence of general-purpose cognitive mechanisms related to intelligence, which appear to facilitate all forms of problem solving, conflicts with the strong modularity view of the mind espoused by some evolutionary psychologists. The current study assessed the contribution of general intelligence ("g") to explaining variation in…