As students gain more experience with design concepts, they should progress from novice to expert design thinkers. The purpose of this research was to identify the constructs of growth in design thinking (DT) over short- (one weekend) and long-term (10 weeks) design challenges. A DT mindset questionnaire was completed by students in a third-year…

Drawing on research in mathematics and science education that has supported student higher-level thinking in K-12 classrooms, we sought to classify the ways of thinking and reasoning supported by robotics coding tasks. As part of a larger project, we examined coding tasks implemented in elementary school classrooms and analyzed ways of thinking…

For a teacher who teaches science concepts to a group of students, he should investigate the level of understanding of various background variants, including differences in dominant multiple intelligence owned by students. This level of understanding can be identified from students' ability to understand concepts in a series of learning phases…

When reasoning about science studies, people often make causal theory errors by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports--or fails to support--a causal claim. This study…

When reasoning about science studies, people often make "causal theory errors" by inferring or accepting a causal claim based on correlational evidence. While humans naturally think in terms of causal relationships, reasoning about science findings requires understanding how evidence supports--or fails to support--a causal claim. This…

It is widely agreed that knowing how prospective teachers develop analogical reasoning in solving problems is essential. Problem solving is specific domain that requires particular ways of analogical reasoning skill. The purposes of this study was to reveal the development of analogical reasoning and strategies used by a prospective teacher. The…

Children display an early sensitivity to implicit proportions (e.g., 1 of 5 apples vs. 3 of 4 apples), but have considerable difficulty in learning the explicit, symbolic proportions denoted by fractions (e.g., "1/5" vs. "3/4"). Theoretically, reducing the gap between representations of implicit versus explicit proportions…

The global climate emergency raises important questions for the future of fieldtrips in geographical education. Building on a longer history of these debates in the discipline, geography educators are paying increased attention to the environmental impacts of field-based education, as demonstrated by the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of…

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

The following research presents the outcomes of a cohort study investigating formal thinking skills among first and second-year secondary school students. A specially crafted instrument, the Logical Thought Performance Test for Adolescents (LTPA), was employed to gauge the level of formal thought. The LTP-A assesses various aspects, including:…

In this paper the author explores and demonstrates the vital role mathematics plays in technology by showing how algebra, and in particular Boolean algebra, has become an essential part of how computers and computer languages work. Both Boolean logic and algebra are core competencies in Computer Science at the university level which may encourage…

In this exploratory descriptive study, changes in one cohort's responses to an authentic statistical investigation at the commencement of years 3 and 4 were analysed. Forty-four students made predictions by interpreting a data table of historical monthly temperatures, represented these data and explained their reasoning. An Awareness of…

The use of linguistic features in school assessments, as well as the impact of these factors on the outcome of assessments have received limited attention in the literature. With this study I aimed to analyse linguistic features of accounting examinations. A quantitative technique, using tests for correlation, was employed to analyse the Grade 12…

This research aims to thoroughly explore how authentic assessment methods, designed to emulate real-life challenges, contribute to enhancing the abilities of students to construct logical arguments, critically evaluate evidence, and articulate thoughts coherently in writing. In order to achieve the stated objective, a qualitative research design…

Teaching syllogistic reasoning is often perceived as teaching pupils the purely formal rules of deductive inference. According to this common conception, such reasoning is a highly abstract skill, one that is carried out by the processing of syntactically encoded representations of the premises. This paper argues that syllogistic reasoning may,…