While the use of experiments is important for developing students' scientific knowledge and skills, challenges may arise when teachers and students are conducting experiments in class, such as non-reusable experimental resources, safety issues and difficulties simulating some specific effects. Augmented reality (AR) technology affords an…

Within mathematics teaching, ways to help students resolve proportional reasoning problems remains a topical issue. This study sought to investigate how a simple innovative procedure could be introduced to enhance skill acquisition. In two classroom-based experiments, 12-year-old students were asked to solve proportional reasoning mathematics…

We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's productive extension of semantic memory through self-generation of new factual knowledge derived through integration of separate yet related facts learned through instruction or through reading. In Experiment 1, an experimenter read the to-be-integrated facts. Children successfully learned and…

Eighth grade students in Australia (N = 60) participated in an experiment on learning how to solve percentage change problems in a regular classroom in three conditions: unitary, pictorial, and equation approaches. The procedure involved a pre-test, an acquisition phase, and a post-test. The main goal was to test the relative merits of the three…

Learning algebra is difficult for many students in part because of an emphasis on the memorization of abstract rules. Algebraic reasoners across expertise levels often rely on perceptual-motor strategies to make these rules meaningful and memorable. However, in many cases, rules are provided as patterns to be memorized verbally, with little overt…

This dissertation explored beliefs about learning from multiple related visual representations in science, and compared beliefs to learning outcomes. Three research questions were explored: 1) What beliefs do pre-service teachers, non-educators and children have about learning from visual representations? 2) What format of presenting those…

Teaching experiments have generated several hypotheses concerning the construction of fraction schemes and operations and relationships among them. In particular, researchers have hypothesized that children's construction of splitting operations is crucial to their construction of more advanced fractions concepts (Steffe, 2002). The authors…

This study reports on a content course for science immersion teacher candidates that emphasized authentic practice of science and thinking scientifically in the context of introductory astrophysics. We explore how 122 science teacher candidates spanning three cohorts did and did not reason scientifically and how this evolved in our program. Our…

Educational games intend to make learning more enjoyable, but carry the potential cost of compromising learning efficiency by consuming both instructional time and student cognitive resources. Therefore, instead of creating an educational game, the authors create a learning environment with game-like elements, the aspects of games that are…

The authors investigated whether the amount of instructional guidance affects science learning and self-efficacy. Sixty 9- and 10-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of the following three instructional conditions: (a) guided instruction consisting of examples and student-generated explanations, (b) direct instruction consisting of a…

It is well established that girls and boys perform differently in traditional examinations in most countries. This study looks at a sample of 754 school students in Kuwait (aged about 13) and explores how boys and girls differ in the performance in a range of tests related to learner characteristics. The fundamental question is how boys and girls…

The main focus of our study was to investigate multimedia effects that had different results from the findings of existing multimedia learning studies. First, we describe and summarize three experimental studies we conducted from 2006 to 2010. Then we analyze our findings to explore learner characteristics that may impact the cognitive processes…

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct writers' reasoning process as reflected in their written texts. The codes resulting from the text analysis were related to cognitive operations, ranging from simple to more sophisticated ones. The sequence of the cognitive operations as the text unfolded represents the writer's cognitive pathway at the…

This study investigated how the format of verbal instructions in computer simulations and prior knowledge (PK) affected 8th graders' cognitive load (CL) level and achievement in a multimedia learning environment. Although PK was not found to significantly affect student performance and CL level, instruction format was found to impact both.…

Sociocognitive conflict has been used as a teaching strategy which may contribute to change students' conceptions about science concepts. The present paper aims at investigating the structure of the dialogic argumentation developed by students, when they are involved in science teaching sequence that have been designed to change their conceptions…