Teacher-research clubs are an effective and infectious way to solve problems and fuel passion. Educators Sally Donnelly and Megan McCormick discuss how their do-it-yourself teacher research club helped their colleagues gain perspective on problems of practice and grew to be an influential part of their school district.

Functional fixedness involves difficulty with conceptualizing creative object uses. When it obstructs problem-solving, individuals must reframe their approach. We examined how different training techniques--chunk decomposition (i.e., considering an object's basic parts and physical properties) and constraint relaxation (i.e., considering an…

The Productive Failure (PF) approach prompts students to attempt to solve a problem prior to instruction -- at which point they typically fail. Yet, research on PF shows that students who are involved in problem solving prior to instruction gain more conceptual knowledge from the subsequent instruction compared to students who receive the…

Participants rated Intuition, Suddenness, Pleasure, and Certainty accompanying their solutions to items of a popular fluid intelligence test -- Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) -- that varied from easy (around 80% correct) to difficult (around 20% correct). The same ratings were collected from four insight problems interleaved with…

Heuristics are approaches engineers use for solving problems and making decisions with quick, often approximate, calculations and/or judgement calls. Such approaches have become marginalized in structural engineering education to make room for more theoretical and precise approaches. As a result, engineering students are less confident with…

Quadratic functions are explained in the three equivalent formats: Standard (or Expanded), Vertex and Factorised. However, cubic functions are represented only in the two equivalent formats: Standard (or Expanded) and Factorised. In this article, the author shows how cubic functions can be expressed in three equivalent formats like quadratic…

Powell, Berry, et al. (in press) conducted a randomized control trial assessing the effects of two variants of word-problem intervention with third graders (n = 304) experiencing mathematics difficulty. Students were assigned to a business-as-usual condition (BaU) or one of two variants of word-problem intervention. One variant included a…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate design principles for transforming existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities to support youths, families with young children and adult members' making and tinkering during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach: Building upon C4P and connected…

The purpose of this research is to study the effectiveness of using the specialized interactive environment Revit Architecture for creativity development. The study methodology relies on an empirical approach, including a sample of students from three Chinese colleges (n = 319) divided into two groups based on learning approach. Accordingly, the…

In this paper, we describe a course project in which teams of undergraduate students propose and execute an end-to-end analytics project to solve a real-world problem. The project challenges students to implement machine learning, optimization, simulation, or a combination of these three techniques on real-world data that they collect. A…

Understanding factors that influence k-12 students' Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) performance is essential to improving their problem-solving ability. Most studies have focused on the relationship between students' psychological factors and STEM performance and have paid little attention to the relationship between…

At present, research on computational thinking in universities is gaining interest, and more attention is being paid to the cultivation and teaching of computational thinking. However, there is a lack of computational thinking assessment tools for college students, which makes it difficult to understand the current status and development of their…

The role of "design" in the exploration of integrated "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" (STEM) education has rapidly expanded in recent years. "Design" has made an important contribution by providing instructional scaffolds in synthesising knowledge from multiple disciplines to solve real-world…

Notable increases in youth mental health problems combined with strains on the already stretched mental health workforce raise concerns that there will be an ensuing increase in youth suicide thoughts, behaviors, and even deaths. Schools are recognized as crucial settings for youth mental health support and suicide prevention activities, yet…

This study aims to test the discovery model integrated with the reading, questioning, and answering (RQA) model. This research is a quasi-study which involves the second semester XI grade students of state senior high school (SMA) Negeri in Situbondo as subjects. The number of students who studied was 160 people from four different classes in the…