Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the results of measuring a sample of engineering students' perceived achievement of complex thinking at different stages of their professional training. This study intended to analyze and predict the differences in the self-perception of achieved complex thinking competency by gender, semester,…

The field of anatomy is often seen by nonanatomists as concerned primarily with the tasks of locating, naming, and describing structures; these tasks, in turn, are often assumed to require only lower-order cognitive skills (LOCSs), i.e., the Knowledge or Comprehension levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Many nonanatomists may thus believe that studying…

Representational competence in science is the ability to generate external representations (e.g. equations, graphs) of real-world phenomena, transform between these representations, and use them in an integrated fashion. Difficulties in achieving representational competence are often considered central to difficulties in learning science.…

Recognising the importance of developing creativity in education, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) included an assessment of creative thinking for the first time in its 2022 cycle -- with the results summarised in the PISA 2022 Results (Volume III) report. While that report focused on comparing countries' performance on…

Students' problem-solving strategies and the differences among strategy groups were explored by analyzing the process data collected during student interactions with computer-based science items. Data were gathered from 1516 eleventh-grade students from 4 schools in China. Analyses of the sequences of students' response actions revealed that the…

Traditional high school physics instruction often comes across as a mere extension of the mathematics classroom to many of our students. Solving numerical physics problems using structures such as the GUESS method (given, unknown, equation, substitute, solve) doesn't help students with conceptual understanding. With the advent of physics education…

This paper examines the contrast and distinction between divergent and convergent scientific creativity, and the paradoxical relationship of scientific creativity with cultural factors in elementary students. With a newly developed measure of potential for scientific creativity, EPoC Science (Lubart et al., in press), students produce ideas in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of traditional versus guided inquiry (with problem-solving process and cognitive function training) on high school chemistry knowledge, science process skills, scientific attitudes, and problem-solving competency. Two classes of students were recruited from three classes of Grade 11…

Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students--physics problem solving--to characterize the underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module…

Students often struggle with solving mechanism problems in organic chemistry courses. They frequently focus on surface features, have difficulty attributing meaning to symbols, and do not recognize tasks that are different from the exact tasks practiced. To be more successful, students need to be able to extract salient features, map similarities…

This study tested the hypothesis that exploratory learning, with and without analogous problems, would improve students' ability to make connections between conceptually-related topics. In this randomized experiment, undergraduates in introductory physics (N = 171) studied a new topic under three different instructional conditions. Order and type…

Conflicting explanations and unrelated information in science classrooms increase cognitive load and decrease efficiency in learning. This reduced efficiency ultimately limits one's ability to solve reasoning problems in the science. In reasoning, it is the ability of students to sift through and identify critical pieces of information that is of…

If a person has "a problem" to solve and knows the solution and just has to apply it (retrieve it from memory and re-act), it is not a problem--it is a task; if a person does not know the solution and has to create it--this is a problem. Using this language, there are only two situations: (a) one has to perform a task; or (b) one has to…

Problem-solving strategies learned by physics undergraduates should prepare them for real-world contexts as they transition from students to professionals. Yet, graduate students in physics-intensive research face problems that go beyond problem sets they experienced as undergraduates and are solved by different strategies than are typically…

Owing to the popularity of tablet computers and smart phones, e-books have become an important medium for both formal and informal learning. However, conventional e-books are mainly designed to provide information in the form of multimedia, implying that students spend most of their time memorizing and comprehending what they read from e-books,…