Given the applicability of measurement to real-world problem solving and the importance of measurement understanding to accessing more advanced mathematics, improving instruction on foundational measurement skills for struggling learners is crucial. Although interventions targeting measurement have a smaller research base than other areas of…

Purpose: Since developing science literacy is a primary objective of science education and socio-scientific (SSI) decision-making is an important aspect of science literacy, it is valuable to explore how students structure their decisions related to SSIs, and how they discuss and solve SSIs. The aim of present study was to examine elementary…

Computers are problem-solving tools at heart. Without an operating system though, they would be rendered useless. Most computer users are unaware of the inherent capabilities of the bare OS and the problems it can solve for them. This comes naturally in an era of commercialized solutions in the form of apps and software packages. However, gaining…

Problem and Project-Based Learning (PBL) emphasise collaborate work on problems relevant to society and emphases the relation between theory and practice. PBL fits engineering students as preparation for their future professions but what about mathematics? Mathematics is not just applied mathematics, but it is also a body of abstract knowledge…

Math and language are inextricably connected. Math cannot be taught without naming certain concepts and finding ways to express mathematical ideas. With the increasing demands on teachers to meet the needs of diverse learners, the role of language development in the mathematics classroom must be at the forefront of instruction. Identifying and…

Decades of research has shown that example-based learning is an effective instructional strategy for learning new skills. The field of learning from examples is seeing a shift in focus towards more innovative and use-inspired research, in part because the use of examples for informal and formal learning purposes has mushroomed. This special issue…

Although findings from cognitive science have suggested learning benefits of confronting errors (Metcalfe, 2017), they are not often capitalized on in many mathematics classrooms (Tulis, 2013). The current study assessed the effects of examples focused on either common mathematical misconceptions and errors or correct concepts and procedures on…

Mathematics textbooks sometimes present worked examples as being generated by particular fictitious students (i.e., "person-presentation"). However, there are indicators that person-presentation of worked examples may harm generalization of the presented strategies to new problems. In the context of comparing and discussing worked…

Background: The wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making are important tools for integrating information between individuals, which can exceed the capacity of individual judgments. They are based on different forms of information integration. The wisdom of crowds refers to the aggregation of many independent judgments without deliberation…

Thought experiments are personal and tacit processes of experimentation that scientists perform within their own imagery in formulating new theories or refuting existing theories. However, by viewing learning as a social process, this study aims to show that thought experiments can also be constructed collaboratively and to present a detailed…

Conditions under which group work leads to learning have been studied in collaborative settings. Little is known, however, about whether and how the interplay between collaboration and cooperation impinges on group learning. In this paper, we study this interplay in the context of mathematical problem-solving. We focus on how training students to…

We share a flipped class approach to university calculus-based general physics that shows increased learning and high student satisfaction compared to traditional lecture classes.

Virtual resources team up to create a computational grid, which is used in computation-intensive problem solving. A majority of these problems require high performance resources to compute and generate results, making grid computation another type of high performance computing. The optimization in computational grids relates to resource…

Drawing on theoretical views of creative deviance, the present study hypothesized that employees with a tendency to break rules are more creative at their jobs (Hypothesis 1). Furthermore, we expected that this is particularly the case when employees face high problem-solving demands (i.e., they are expected to be creative) but at the same time…

Research on productive failure suggests that attempting to solve a problem prior to instruction facilitates conceptual understanding compared to receiving instruction prior to problem solving. The assumptions are that during the problem-solving phase, students activate their prior knowledge, become aware of their knowledge gaps, and discover deep…