Reflexivity refers to the capacity for individuals to understand the cultural system and manage their own position within it. Reflexivity is a key concept in the understanding of intercultural communication, particularly in recognising the ability for individuals to understand and adapt to new cultural contexts. However, the prevailing methods…

Research indicates that understanding levels of abstraction (LOA) and being able to move between the levels is essential to programming success. For K-5 contexts LOA levels have been named: problem, design, code and running the code. In a qualitative exploratory study, five K-5 teachers were interviewed on their uses of LOA, particularly the…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) was considered as an effective way to engage learners and enhance learning performance. This case study demonstrates a design case that uses DGBL to support writing practices using student-centered pedagogy in K-12 education. Minecraft is used as a tool of transferring students' imagination and abstract design to…

Background: Key to optimizing Computational Thinking (CT) instruction is a precise understanding of the underlying cognitive skills. Román-González et al. (2017) reported unique contributions of spatial abilities and reasoning, whereas arithmetic was not significantly related to CT. Disentangling the influence of spatial and numerical skills on CT…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…

This study used integrative data analysis (Curran & Hussong, 2009), which allows combining data from different studies, to examine the generalizability of a research-based mathematics program, schema-based instruction (SBI), with a focus on proportional reasoning. Data were pooled from existing SBI studies spanning three U.S. states in which…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

The capacity to recognise, represent, and reason about relationships between different quantities, that is, to think multiplicatively, has long been recognised as critical to success in school mathematics in the middle years and beyond. Building on recent research that found a strong link between multiplicative thinking and algebraic, geometrical,…

This article assesses how people reason with categories whose features are related in causal cycles. Whereas models based on causal graphical models (CGMs) have enjoyed success modeling category-based judgments as well as a number of other cognitive phenomena, CGMs are only able to represent causal structures that are acyclic. A number of new…

In this paper, we contend that what to teach about scientific reasoning has been bedeviled by a lack of clarity about the construct. Drawing on the insights emerging from a cognitive history of science, we argue for a conception of scientific reasoning based on six "styles of scientific reasoning." Each "style" requires its own…

This article describes how to play two abstract strategy board games: (1) "Blokus" which uses polyominoes--plane geometric figures formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge; and (2) "Gemblo" which uses translucent, colored pieces, each of which is made up of one to five hexagons.

After describing Wittgenstein's notion of "certainty", in this article I provide four arguments to demonstrate that no certainty can be acquired at will. Specifically, I argue that, in order to assimilate a certainty, it is irrelevant whether the individual concerned (1) has found a ground that seemingly justifies that certainty; (2) has…

To contribute to the sparse educational research on student understanding of eigenspace, we investigated how students reason about linear combinations of eigenvectors. We present results from student reasoning on two written multiple-choice questions with open-ended justifications involving linear combinations of eigenvectors in which the…

The main aim of the present investigation was to examine conditional reasoning skills in college students whose educational past had emphasized verbatim learning. A successive independent-samples design was utilized to explore the effects of instruction that explicitly targeted critical thinking principles in either freshman students or…