This study investigates the effects of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for computational thinking (CT) on managing cognitive load and enhancing problem-solving skills in collaborative programming. Four different scaffolding conditions were provided to help learners optimize cognitive load and improve their problem-solving abilities. A total…

This review is aimed at synthesizing current findings concerning technology-based cognitive offloading and the associated effects on learning and memory. While cognitive externalization (i.e., using the environment to outsource mental computation) is a highly useful technique in various problem-solving tasks, a growing body of research suggests…

Students, even as young as kindergarten, are natural problem solvers (Carpenter et al., 2017). Even before they learn to count, they can make sense of mathematical problems and real- world situations (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2022). Kindergartners can make sense of complex story problems, including Separate Start Unknown…

This article presents a novel digital method of capturing finger-based gestures on touchscreen devices for the purpose of exploring tracing gestures in educational research. Given that tracing has been found to support cognition, learning, and problem solving in educational settings, data related to the performance of these gestures are…

Every educator knows the sinking feeling of a lesson gone wrong. As teachers look around the room and realize that many of their students are just not getting it, they often feel like failures. However, the struggle students experience as they persevere through high-quality challenging tasks is not a sign of failure, but rather a key aspect of…

As computational thinking (CT) gains more attention in K-16 education, problem-solving has been more emphasized as a core competency that can be found across various domains. To develop an evaluation framework that reveals students' problem-solving competency, this study examined solutions for the Bebras Computing Challenge which requires students…

Objective: Explicit instructions to students to use the index finger to trace out specified elements of mathematics worked examples have been shown to improve mathematics learning outcomes; however, there is limited research on whether the magnitude of tracing actions impacts these outcomes. Method: Using an experimental design, 34 adults were…

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners' computational thinking. Design/methodology/approach: By…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a word association retrieval task that consists of a series of problems, each with three seemingly unrelated prompt words. The subject is asked to produce a single word that is related to all three prompt words. In this paper, we provide support for a theory in which the RAT assesses a person's ability to…

The literature reports preservice teachers' overuse of proportionality when solving geometric similarity problems with nonproportional relationships. Changing this type of error is reported as difficult even after applying certain interventions. As a solution to this type of error, this study used augmented reality activities to facilitate the…

It has become increasingly clear that the early use of decomposition for addition is associated with later mathematical achievement. This study examined how younger children execute a base-10 decomposition strategy to solve complex arithmetic (e.g. two-digit addition). 24 addition problems in two modalities (WA: Written Arithmetic; OA: Oral…

Previous research has not adequately explored students' behavioral processes when addressing computational thinking (CT) problems of varying difficulty, limiting insights into students' detailed CT development characteristics. This study seeks to fill this gap by employing gamified CT items across multiple difficulty levels to calculate…

Children with mathematical difficulties need to spend more time than typically achieving children on solving even simple equations. Since these tasks already require a larger share of their cognitive resources, additional demands imposed by the need to switch between tasks may lead to a greater decline of performance in children with mathematical…

People frequently gesture when problem-solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which…