This article is written in response to listening to teachers query the place of fun in learning. Students often express that learning should be fun but teachers are often unsure what they mean by this and whether fun is actually important to learning. We have drawn some relevant understandings and views together to promote further conversation and…

Many key concerns require engagement with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) knowledge. Consider the complexity and nuance of climate change, energy policy, health and medicine, and data security. Informed voting or decision-making on such issues is no easy task; effective participation in our society requires considerable…

Reading, like all areas of human learning, is complex and multidimensional. Educational psychology has an opportunity to contribute further to a science of reading, and potentially to a science of reading instruction, by expanding its traditional theoretical and methodological orientations to embrace this complexity. Topics central to this effort…

This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

In this ninth chapter of "Interpreting Kant in Education," I respond to familiar criticisms in education theory of a dualism that is seen to be at the heart of Kant's philosophy. This, and related charges of a detached conception of mind, are addressed through a discussion of concepts--conceptual unity, conceptual distinctions, how these…

While environmental problems are urgent in modern society, they are especially difficult to tackle because of their normative and politically controversial nature. Universities may choose different theoretical paradigms for the teaching of environmental problems. However, limited theoretical and/or practical analysis has been undertaken of the…

The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental sequence. This article underscores the importance of a robust epistemological foundation, advocating for…

There has been a long-standing debate on situational and symbolic mathematics, which is associated with how to design and execute mathematics education for all students. Brain studies can give some clues for how to deal with the debate. There are situational, verbalized, and visuospatial brain networks and the connectivity among the networks,…

Cognitive load theory's incorporation of evolutionary perspectives has generated several instructional designs based on movement, including the tracing effect, occurring when learners benefit from explicit instructions to trace out specific elements of lesson materials with the index finger. Historical descriptions of children's tracing behaviours…

This paper frames children's mathematics as mathematics. Specifically, it draws upon our knowledge of children's mathematics and applies it to understanding the prime number theorem. Elementary school arithmetic emphasizes two principal operations: addition and multiplication. Through their units coordination activity, children construct two…

In this article, we explore the uniqueness of argumentation within the field of history, considering whether historians' processes in crafting an interpretive argument from inexact evidence might provide insights into processes vital for informed civic engagement and civil dialogue in democratic societies. We discuss the role of argumentation in…

The relationship between working memory and speech has been a topic of intense research interest and investigation for many years. Memory studies have found that the active processing of working memory is required for language comprehension and speech production. Though there are studies that discuss the capacity of working memory, the processing…

Mathematical modeling and applications are an important part of curriculum and considered to be important for students' current and future lives. In this contribution, we focus on mathematical modeling from a cognitive prospective. Following embedding the cognitive perspective within the discourse of mathematical modeling, we describe some of the…

Although cognitive load (CL) and self-regulated learning (SRL) have been widely recognized as two determinant factors of students' performance, the integration of these two factors is still in its infancy. To further specify why and how CL links with SRL, we first conducted an overview to describe the multiple dimensions of cognitive load (i.e.,…

Think alouds are valuable tools for academicians, test developers, and practitioners as they provide a unique window into a respondent's thinking during an assessment. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight novel ways to use think alouds as a means to gather evidence about respondents' thinking. An intended outcome from this special…