To help young students succeed in problem-based learning (PBL), researchers suggested investigating students' need for cognition (NFC), one's inclination to exert mental effort during learning. How one puts mental effort into a learning task is related to motivation. If motivated, students are more likely to engage in challenging tasks, put in…

Educators consider the development of problem-solving skills in learners to be a primary goal of contemporary teaching and learning efforts. Yet, participating in problem-centered instruction is challenging for learners, and educators have sought different ways of supporting learners as they make sense of complex content. Social media applications…

Agency is a core pedagogical goal of the maker education movement. However, there are still many unknowns about how agency is identified in maker settings. To document maker educator professional visions of agency, we conducted video-cued interviews with eleven U.S-based maker educators using video clips of families making in a drop-in…

Problem-posing has been regarded as a potential method to engage students in deeper thinking; however, without sufficient supports, most students could encounter difficulties in posing quality problems. In this study, a concept mapping-based online cooperative problem-posing (CM-OCPP) approach is proposed to guide students to complete…

In most middle schools, learning is segregated by discipline. Yet interdisciplinary approaches have been shown to cultivate creative thinking, support problem solving, and develop interest while supporting knowledge gains (NAE & NRC in STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research. National Academies Press,…

In the contemporary society, it is important to cultivate students' visual literacy. However, there has been a lack of sufficient training for students to improve their visual literacy in the classroom. A problem-posing approach (Visual Thinking Strategy, VTS, a learning strategy with question sequences to facilitate critical inquiry) has been…

Critical thinking is identified as a key educational outcome in higher education curricula; however, it is not trivial to support students in building this multifaceted skill. In this study, we evaluated a brief online learning intervention focusing on informal fallacy identification, a hallmark critical-thinking skill. The intervention used a…

This study investigated how a computer science (CS) problem-based curriculum impacted elementary students' CS learning and attitudes. Four sixth-grade teachers and 200 of their students participated in the study. Researchers developed a CS curriculum in collaboration with the teachers, which consisted of two main units: (1) an introduction to…

The Every Student Succeeds Act supports personalized learning (PL) to close achievement gaps of diverse K-12 learners in the United States. Implementing PL into a classroom entails a paradigm change of the educational system. However, it is demanding to transform traditional practice into a personalized one under the pressure of the annual…