The language that students use with whole numbers can be insufficient when learning integers. This is often the case when children interpret addition as "getting more" or "going higher." In this study, we explore whether instruction on mapping directed magnitudes to operations helps 88 second graders and 70 fourth graders solve…

An emerging consensus suggests that guided discovery, which combines discovery and instruction, is a more effective educational approach than either one in isolation. The goal of this study was to examine two specific forms of guided discovery, testing whether conceptual instruction should precede or follow exploratory problem solving. In both…

Providing exploratory activities prior to explicit instruction can facilitate learning. However, the level of guidance provided during the exploration has largely gone unstudied. In this study, we examined the effects of 1 form of guidance, feedback, during exploratory mathematics problem solving for children with varying levels of prior domain…

Animal species identification is often emphasized as a basic prerequisite for an understanding of ecology because ecological interactions are based on interactions between species at least as it is taught on the school level. Therefore, training identification skills or using identification books seems a worthwhile task in biology education, and…