Neurodiversity in learning is the understanding that the different neurological development of students impacts their learning. In adopting a neurodiverse approach to education, educators shift the paradigm from being focused on student deficits to highlighting students' strengths. Many K-8 independent schools do not have explicit programs or…

Solving a novel problem has recently garnered some attention as a viable alternative to traditional explicit instruction in the preparation of students for learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of introducing problem-solving tasks and worked examples prior to explicit instruction, along with the use of contrast, for gifted and…

An experimental study was conducted to examine the effects of shared book reading and video viewing on preschoolers' vocabulary and knowledge acquisition in informational text. The study included 60 preschool children who were randomly assigned to three experimental groups --shared book reading group, video viewing group, and shared book reading…

Mole, molar mass and the Avogadro number are used constantly to measure the amount of substance in chemical changes. However, students have difficulty in understanding these concepts because they are not familiar with measuring very small amounts of matter that cannot be seen and weighed in daily life, like atoms. The mole concept was developed to…

Background: Museums have been paying an increasing attention to the design of experiences conducive to informal learning. While spontaneous inquiries in museums often pique visitors' intrinsic motivation to learn, certain structures or scaffolds are needed to facilitate sense making in museum learning. Two promising approaches are identified:…

Over four semesters of a large introductory statistics course the authors found students were engaging in contract cheating on Chegg.com during multiple choice examinations. In this paper we describe our methodology for identifying, addressing and eventually eliminating cheating. We successfully identified 23 out of 25 students using a combination…

Higher education physics has long been a field with a disproportionately skewed representation in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Responding to this challenge, this study explores the trajectories of "unexpected" (i.e., demographically under-represented) students into higher education physics. Based on timeline-guided life-history…

In regular dance teaching, teachers find it difficult to pay attention to and meet the specific needs of each student. Extended-reality (XR) has the potential to help students get more information to dance learning. This study developed an XR interactive learning system to assist teachers in dance teaching, and explored the impact of XR on the…

This study investigated how 155 pre-service teachers solved three pattern generalization problems in a two-part written test and sequenced them for teaching purposes to demonstrate their curricular noticing. Participants' solutions were analyzed using inductive content analysis, which showed that only 8.4% of PSTs produced correct answers to all…

Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers' mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines…

Vocabulary acquisition is a central component of second language learning. While there have been advancements in our understanding of the factors contributing to vocabulary acquisition in L2 students, it is still unclear how language aptitude is associated with the effects of task involvement load in this process. This study investigates the…

In recent years, the interest in measuring growth in student ability in various subjects between different grades in school has increased. Therefore, good precision in the estimated growth is of importance. This paper aims to compare estimation methods and test designs when it comes to precision and bias of the estimated growth of mean ability…

This study examined assessment item difficulty patterns in two energy aspects, energy source/form/transfer and energy degradation/conservation, across and within science disciplines. The participant students were taking at least one college-level introductory science course. Findings showed a common pattern of item difficulties for the two energy…

Teachers make many important decisions about instruction during the process of planning. While educational researchers have extensively explored teacher planning, this research has largely neglected the ways teachers attend to subject matter while planning. We first explore ways a sample of 13 experienced secondary biology teachers attend to…

Genetics is known to be one of the most challenging subjects in biology education because of its abstract concepts and processes. Therefore, hands-on experiments in authentic learning environments are supposed to increase comprehensibility and provide otherwise unavailable experiences to students. We applied a hands-on module in an out-of-school…