A fundamental role of education is to equip students with sound justificatory reasoning capacities to support one's beliefs or actions and to guide rational decisions about complex problems. However, empirical research into justificatory reasoning among students is virtually non-existent and this impedes education research. This study illustrated…

Existing accounts of student thinking about mechanical wave propagation and superposition emphasize that students sometimes treat wave pulses as objects, saying, for example, that pulses bounce off of one another when they meet. In this paper, we present a context in which students explicitly reason about pulses as not-objects, instead describing…

Mathematical problems can be divided into two types, namely, process-open and process-constrained problems. Solving these two types of problems may require different cognitive mechanisms. However, there has been only one study that investigated the differences of the cognitive abilities in process-open and process-constrained problem solving, and…

This research explored the interrelationship among Taiwanese high school students' conceptions of learning science (COLS), self-regulated learning science (SRLS), and science learning self-efficacy (SLSE). A total of 309 students participated in the study, and the self-report survey data were collected to measure these three constructs. Four COLS…

The goal of this study was to test nonverbal intelligence and neighborhood social capital as protective factors against future delinquency in early adolescent youth placed at risk by virtue of their involvement in childhood conduct problems. Analyzing longitudinal data from 3,028 youth (1,565 boys, 1,463 girls) in one cohort of the Longitudinal…

Students often show difficulties in understanding rational numbers. Often, these are related to the natural number bias, that is, the tendency to apply the properties of natural numbers to rational number tasks. Although this phenomenon has received a lot of research interest over the last two decades, research on the existence of qualitatively…

This article investigates how social inequality is reproduced through the recontextualization of mathematics pedagogy, using Dowling's social activity method as an analytical framework. The study identifies the selection and transmission of pedagogic messages as a potential pathway. Findings indicate that teachers in upper-stream schools favour…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

This study compares the effects of object-oriented and robot programming activities on programming achievement, abstraction, problem solving, and motivation. In the study, two consecutive experimental cases were conducted to examine the consistency of findings. The research sample comprises 81 tenth-grade students undergoing vocational secondary…

Systems thinking and abstract thinking are important skills for engineers in general and hardware and software engineers in particular. Systems thinking emphasises the interdependence of system components and their synergy. Abstract thinking permits one to focus on the significant details of the current perspective, while temporarily neglecting…

Generalisation is a key feature of learning algebra, requiring all four proficiency strands of the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics (AC:M): Understanding, Fluency, Problem Solving and Reasoning. From a review of the literature, we propose a learning progression for algebraic generalisation consisting of five levels. Our learning progression is…

Classroom communication is increasingly accepted as multimodal, through the orchestrated use of different semiotic modes, resources, and systems. There is growing interest in examining the meaning-making potential of other modes (e.g., gestural, visual, kinesthetic) beyond the semiotic mode of language, in classroom communication and in student…

The purpose of this study is to investigate a mathematically gifted student's self-regulation behaviours while constructing and consolidating mathematical knowledge. However, the objective is to determine which self-regulation strategies influence this student's mathematical abstraction process. The case study method was used in the research. As…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

The authors argue that Ambridge's radical exemplar account of language cannot clearly explain all syntactic priming evidence, such as inverse preference effects ("greater" priming for less frequent structures), and the contrast between short-lived lexical boost and long-lived abstract priming. Moreover, without recourse to a level of…