Critical thinking is essential in academia and the workforce. Although writing can be used as a pedagogical tool for fostering deeper subject matter understanding, increased retention, and critical thinking, relatively few science courses are writing based. This writing-based introductory science course provided an opportunity for students to…

Big ideas, sometimes referred to as key, core, fundamental or threshold concepts, are widely applicable concepts at the heart of disciplines that are or have been central and influential for their fields. Attention here is particularly directed to meta-concepts common to sister disciplines in the sciences. "Learning thresholds",…

This paper shares findings from the study of a learning sequence designed to support prospective elementary teachers (PTs) in identifying evidence of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. Conceptual understanding and procedural fluency are widely recognized as important to teaching and learning mathematics, and identifying evidence of…

Learning Trajectories have the potential to be used as a tool to advance equity by explicitly connecting to anti-deficit framing and asset-based instruction. This plenary paper highlights research on three use cases for learning trajectories (LT) with an intentionality around promoting equity: 1) the use of LT based Lesson Study with vertical…

This report documents how one undergraduate student used set-based reasoning to reinvent logical principles related to conditional statements and their proofs. This learning occurred in a teaching experiment intended to foster abstraction of these logical relationships by comparing the predicate and inference structures among various proofs (in…