This study examined 68 parents' views of the self-determination skills and capacities of their young adult children with autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disability (ages 19-21 years). Results indicated parents placed a high value on the importance of all seven component skills (i.e., choice-making skills, decision-making skills,…

The study aimed to determine the comparative effectiveness of context-based and traditional teaching approaches in enhancing student achievement in genetics, problem-solving, science inquiry and decision-making skills, and attitude towards the study of life sciences. A mixed method but essentially quantitative research approach involving a…

Evidence-based practice and data-driven decision making (DDDM) are two approaches to accountability that have been promoted in the school literature. In spite of the push to promote these approaches in schools, barriers to their widespread, appropriate, and effective use have limited their impact on practice and student outcomes. This article…

This invited commentary includes observations about the article "Building Local Capacity for Training and Coaching Data-Based Problem Solving with Positive Behavior Interventions and Support Teams," published in the July 2011 issue of the "Journal of Applied School Psychology." In this article Newton and colleagues present an interesting field…

Striving for sustainability requires a paradigm shift in conceptualization, thinking, research and education, particularly concerning the science-technology-environment-society (STES) interfaces. Consequently, "STES literacy" requires the development of students' question asking, critical, evaluative system thinking, decision making and problem…

Within an RtI problem-solving context, assessment and decision making generally center around the tasks of problem identification, problem analysis, progress monitoring, and program evaluation. We use this framework to discuss the current state of the literature regarding curriculum based measurement, its technical properties, and its utility for…

In today's educational environment, schools struggle to meet the academic needs of every student. Many schools are challenged by the use of a response-to-intervention framework in which too many students need strong interventions. This article details a data-driven, decision-making response-to-intervention reading team model in which teachers,…

This paper examines the way two 10th graders cope with a non-standard generalisation problem that involves elementary concepts of number theory (more specifically linear Diophantine equations) in the geometrical context of a rectangle's area. Emphasis is given on how the students' past experience of problem solving (expressed through interplay…

Complex dynamic control (CDC) tasks are a type of problem-solving environment used for examining many cognitive activities (e.g., attention, control, decision making, hypothesis testing, implicit learning, memory, monitoring, planning, and problem solving). Because of their popularity, there have been many findings from diverse domains of research…

In order to cope with complex issues in the science-technology-environment-society context, one must develop students' high-order learning skills, such as question-asking ability (QAA), critical thinking, evaluative thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving capabilities within science education. In this study, we are concerned with evaluating…

A problem that is still unexplored in the field of socioscientific issues (SSI) and that was explored in this study is how different students decide upon a SSI they are discussing, how their justifications change during the instruction and how they use (or not) the evidence from the learning environment to support their justifications. For the…

Despite multiple calls for reform, the curriculum for first-year college chemistry at many universities across the world is still mostly fact-based and encyclopedic, built upon a collection of isolated topics, oriented too much towards the perceived needs of chemistry majors, focused too much on abstract concepts and algorithmic problem solving,…

This theoretical paper explores the decision-making process involved in modelling and mathematizing situations during problem solving. Specifically, it focuses on the authority behind these choices (i.e., what or who determines the chosen mathematical models). We show that different types of situations involve different sources of authority,…

Many schools have problem-solving teams that support teachers by helping identify and resolve students' academic and social problems. Although research is limited, it has been found that teams sometimes fail to implement problem-solving processes with fidelity, which may hinder the resolution of problems. We developed the Team-Initiated Problem…

The role of causal beliefs in people's decisions when faced with economic problems was investigated. Two experiments are reported that vary the causal structure in prisoner's dilemma-like economic situations. We measured willingness to cooperate or defect and collected justifications and think-aloud protocols to examine the strategies that people…