Productive struggle (PS) has emerged as a critical construct in mathematics education, emphasizing the importance of persistence, cognitive engagement, and conceptual understanding in problem-solving. However, inconsistencies in its conceptual and operational definitions have hindered its effective implementation and assessment. This study…

Metaphor is a tool that helps us perceive the world by expressing more than word art. Metaphors are used in certain areas of education. It appears in different ways in the fields of literature, philosophy, sociology, educational sciences, social studies. Teachers also tell concrete and abstract data through metaphors to make it easier to keep in…

Various theories and models have implicitly discussed the role of interaction when using learning technologies. Indeed, interaction is described as being important as it relates to technology adoption, cognitive load, and usability. While each of these perspectives describe elements of interaction, they fail to comprehensively detail how educators…

This experiment examined learning differences between students who read instructional examples that varied in the order that information was presented. In an online lesson about advice giving, 275 students were randomly assigned to a learning condition where the order of instructional information moved either from (a) concrete examples to abstract…

In this commentary on Van Leeuwen (2015, this issue), I explore the relation between theory and practice in learning analytics. Specifically, I caution against adhering to one specific theoretical doctrine while ignoring others, suggest deeper applications of cognitive load theory to understanding teaching with analytics tools, and comment on…

Although augmented reality (AR) has gained much research attention in recent years, the term AR was given different meanings by varying researchers. In this article, we first provide an overview of definitions, taxonomies, and technologies of AR. We argue that viewing AR as a concept rather than a type of technology would be more productive for…

Reading academic hypertext documents in college brings a new level of complexity that changes the definition of college reading and literacy. Knowing how to read these unpredictable, nonlinear texts requires familiarity and practice. The author describes the nature and usefulness of hypertext, reviews the challenges of reading hypertext, and…

This article is concerned with how computer science, and more exactly computational complexity theory, can inform cognitive science. In particular, we suggest factors to be taken into account when investigating how people deal with computational hardness. This discussion will address the two upper levels of Marr's Level Theory: the computational…

This study investigates cognitive difficulties and mathematical ideas that are related to making connections among representations. A three-week intervention was designed and implemented to help prospective secondary mathematics teachers develop understanding of big ideas that are critical to connection of representations in algebra. This study…

For the thirty-ninth time, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes.…

Discusses hierarchical complexity of tasks as a way of conceptualizing information in terms of the power required to complete a task, and its implications for developmental psychology and information science. Provides an analytic solution to the definition of developmental stages and allows for the possibility within the science of scaling the…

Undergraduate students using an imagery mnemonic mediating technique involving "keywords" to learn definitions of thirty unfamiliar words performed better on a 1-week delayed comprehension test, on at least half of the definitions, than those who read and copied definitions. Mnemonic mediating strategies worked better than nonmediating strategies…