With the challenges of a global pandemic, political and social unrest, and the consequences these issues bring, there is a universal call for empathy as we attempt to maneuver through this tumultuous time. For instructional designers, this includes employing empathy and empathic design as they grapple with how to design instructional interventions…

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization, access to IT resources, and digital inclusion in the Italian school system. This paper presents D-UDA (i.e., "unità didattica di apprendimento digitale", in Italian), a digital didactic unit for learning mathematics concepts. The presented approach combines teaching methodologies and…

A majority of research in Computational Thinking (CT) mainly focuses on teaching coding to school students. However, CT involves more than just coding and includes other skills like algorithmic thinking. The current study developed an Online Inquiry-based Learning Platform for Computational Thinking (CT-ONLINQ) that follows Inquiry-Based Learning…

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…

In this mixed-methods study, we examined if students benefitted from a game design course offered during an enrichment hour in terms of gains in their system analysis and design skills. Students at a rural middle school in Southeast US (n = 19) attended a 1-hour game design course offered weekly during an academic enrichment class period, for the…

Considerable effort has been invested in innovative learning practices such as collaborative inquiry. Collaborative problem solving is becoming popular in school settings, but there is limited knowledge on how to develop skills crucial in collaborative problem solving in students. Based on the intervention design in social interaction of…

Complex Problem Solving (CPS) skills are essential to successfully deal with environments that change dynamically and involve a large number of interconnected and partially unknown causal influences. The increasing importance of such skills in the 21st century requires appropriate assessment and intervention methods, which in turn rely on adequate…

Critical thinking (CT) is a metacognitive process, consisting of a number of sub-skills and dispositions, that, when used appropriately, increases the chances of producing a logical solution to a problem or a valid conclusion to an argument. CT has been identified as a fundamental learning objective of third-level education; however, students…