Engineering technology students often forgo a methodical approach of solving or answering questions on assignments or exams in favor of an intuition-based approach, emphasizing educated guessing (Broberg et al., 2008). Faculty observations have noted these student solutions often provide explanations, usually sans calculations, to support answers…

Intuition is one of the main factors that drive our everyday decision-making which happens quickly and unconsciously. Individuals often rely on the use of intuition to solve either simple or complex problems. The purpose of this research study is to further break down an individual's thinking processes by understanding how different groups of…

This paper describes our work to determine the naturalistic images that first-time second-semester university calculus students possess for series convergence. We found that the students we interviewed most frequently determined whether a series converged by imagining a process of appending summands into a running total and examining whether this…

How should our students think about external forcing in differential equations setting, and how can we help them gain intuition? To address this question, we share a variety of problems and projects that explore the dynamics of the undamped forced spring-mass system. We provide a sequence of discovery-based exercises that foster physical and…

In 2012 the New Zealand Government identified as a priority the need to address the undersupply of students studying STEM subjects for delivering its Business Growth Agenda. Low engagement and retention rates in STEM subjects contribute to the shortage of STEM graduates, producing a negative impact on the New Zealand economy. This Teaching and…

In this article we study the conceptions of an American and a French group of undergraduate pre-service teachers regarding the concept of independent events. Specifically, we study the role that intuition plays in their answers, ascertain the presence of probabilistic biases, and compare the findings with previous results collected on a different…

Higher working memory capacity (WMC) improves performance on a range of cognitive and academic tasks. However, a greater ability to control attention sometimes leads individuals with higher WMC to persist in using complex, attention-demanding approaches that are suboptimal for a given task. We examined whether higher WMC would hinder insight…

Open-ended questions that can be solved using different strategies help students learn and integrate content, and provide teachers with greater insights into students' unique capabilities and levels of understanding. This article provides a problem that was modified to allow for multiple approaches. Students tended to employ high-powered, complex,…

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) increase the ability and tendency to devote greater attentional control to a task--improving performance on a wide range of skills. In addition, recent research on enclothed cognition demonstrates that the situational influence of wearing a white lab coat increases controlled attention, due…

Base-rate neglect refers to the tendency for people to underweight base-rate probabilities in favor of diagnostic information. It is commonly held that base-rate neglect occurs because effortful (Type 2) reasoning is required to process base-rate information, whereas diagnostic information is accessible to fast, intuitive (Type 1) processing…

Although a large part the Physics Education Research (PER) literature investigates students' conceptual understanding in physics, these investigations focus on qualitative, conceptual reasoning. Even in modeling expert problem solving, attention to conceptual understanding means a focus on initial qualitative analysis of the problem; the equations…

This study investigated the effects of working in dyads and their associated gender composition on performance (solution rate and time) and process variables (number of impasses, number of passed solutions, and number of problem solving suggestions and interactions) in a set of classic insight problem solving tasks. Two types of insight problems…

Learning physics often requires overcoming common misconceptions based on naïve interpretations of observations in the everyday world. One proposed way to help learners build appropriate physics intuitions is to expose them to computer simulations in which motion is based on Newtonian principles. In addition, playing video games that require…

The study utilized a multi-method approach to explore the connection between critical thinking and epistemological beliefs in a specific problem-solving situation. Data drawn from a sample of ten third-year bioscience students were collected using a combination of a cognitive lab and a performance task from the Collegiate Learning Assessment…

There is a general assumption that a more controlled or more focused attentional state is beneficial for most cognitive tasks. However, there has been a growing realization that creative problem solving tasks, such as the Remote Associates Task (RAT), may benefit from a less controlled solution approach. To test this hypothesis, in a 2x2 design,…