This naturalistic inquiry investigated how instructional designers engage in complex and ambiguous problem solving across organizational boundaries in two corporations. Participants represented a range of instructional design experience, from novices to experts. Research methods included a participant background survey, observations of…

This author is on a journey--hoping that his expertise might have some small local impact. He shares his experiences that might relate to those who are thinking about volunteering abroad, or trying to modernise a system that is cemented in place. Creating change, developing teaching styles, and working for a charity are some of the challenges he…

This study examines the epistemic beliefs about justification employed by physics undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the context of solving a standard classical physics problem and a frontier physics problem. Data were collected by a think-aloud problem solving session followed by a semi-structured interview conducted with 50…

Today, more than ever, teachers must work effectively and efficiently to meet seemingly contradictory demands placed on them by society. On the one hand, school personnel are tasked with attaining and publicly reporting high levels of student achievement in response to No Child Left Behind. On the other, school personnel must ensure that students…

Parents--whether they're biological parents, legal guardians, grandparents, or other family members who are primary caregivers--can be the most critical partners teachers have in their students' academic journeys. How can teachers build effective relationships that help students to succeed? This article provides ideas and methods that can help…

Students are frequently presented with novel visualizations introducing scientific concepts and processes normally unobservable to the naked eye. Despite being unfamiliar, students are expected to understand and employ the visualizations to solve problems. Domain experts exhibit more competency than novices when using complex visualizations, but…

The concept of connected learning proposes that youth leverage individual interest and social media to drive learning with an academic focus. To illustrate, we present in-depth case studies of Ryan and Sam, two middle-school-age youth, to document an out-of-school intervention intended to direct toward intentional learning in STEM that taps…

Researchers are embarking on increasingly diverse careers where collaboration, networking and interdisciplinarity are becoming more important. Transferable skills (e.g. communication skills and problem-solving abilities) can help researchers operate more effectively in different work environments. While researchers acquire some of these skills in…

Context: Highly developed critical thinking and the ability to discriminate among many possible therapeutic interventions is a core behavior for the practicing athletic trainer. However, while athletic training students receive a great deal of clinically applicable information, many are not explicitly trained in efficient methods for channeling…

Though principals play an important role in setting the vision for a school, and moving their staffs toward that vision, it is increasingly apparent that teachers must take on active decision-making and problem-solving roles. By sharing these responsibilities, schools can tap into the expertise of those most in tune with teaching and learning, and…

Parson's programming puzzles are a family of code construction assignments where lines of code are given, and the task is to form the solution by sorting and possibly selecting the correct code lines. We introduce a novel family of Parson's puzzles where the lines of code need to be sorted in two dimensions. The vertical dimension is used to order…

It is reasonable to assume that people are creative, but the degree of creativity is different. The Idea of the level of student's creative thinking has been expressed by experts, such as Gotoh (2004), and Krulik and Rudnick (1999). The perspective of the mathematics creative thinking refers to a combination of logical and divergent thinking which…

How do children use questions as tools to acquire new knowledge? The current experiment examined preschool children's ability to direct questions to appropriate sources to acquire knowledge. Fifty preschoolers engaged in a task that entailed asking questions to discover which special key would open a box that contained a prize. Children solved…

The aim of this article is to encourage a greater emphasis on creativity across and between varied fields of endeavour. It has been written to underline the interdisciplinary significance of creativity and the role of creativity in truly enhancing achievement. There is a reinvigorated awareness of the need for "big thinking", a global…

When a course designed around cooperative, problem-centered instruction attracts learners with a wide range of experience in the topic, should learners be grouped heterogeneously or homogeneously in terms of their relative expertise? In this study, learners were randomly distributed between the two types of groups; learning gains, satisfaction,…