This article discusses the nature of implicit knowledge, something which is considered to be highly influential in learning. The notion of implicit knowledge is important in conceptualising studies exploring student thinking and learning in chemistry, and in considering how the results of such studies should be interpreted to inform teaching.…

The emergence of a proof image is often an important stage in a learner's construction of a proof. In this paper, we introduce, characterize, and exemplify the notion of proof image. We also investigate how proof images emerge. Our approach starts from the learner's efforts to construct a justification without (or before) attempting any…

The focus of this article is a theoretical discussion and analysis of the concept of intuition. The article investigates how intuition, in the psychological sense, is connected with concepts like problem-solving, reflective thinking, automatized thinking activities and understanding 'gestalt' or structure and meaning. Automatisms are based on…

The rapid and accelerating pace of change in physiology and cell biology, along with the easy access to huge amounts of content, have altered the playing field for science students, yet most students are still mainly taught from textbooks. Of necessity, textbooks are usually broad in scope, cover topics much more superficially than do journal…

Learning in the wholetheme approach is defined as reorganizing one's own intuitive knowledge base, as opposed to storing facts. This presentation discusses several thematic organizers to illustrate their role as a teaching tool in helping learners reorganize their own intuitive knowledge base. Intimately tied to the brain's ground-figure processes…

A metrics and mapping framework is proposed to account for how heuristics, domain-specific reasoning, and intuitive statistical induction processes are integrated to generate estimates. Results of 4 experiments involving 188 undergraduates illustrate framework usefulness and suggest when people use heuristics and when they emphasize…