This mixed methods study explored the pre and post use of metacognitive problem solving skills of 15 undergraduate students enrolled in a mathematics class in a Midwestern university. Participants' progress in their metacognitive self-talk and group-talk was monitored as they used Pulse® Smartpens to simultaneously capture their writing and spoken…

As our society has become increasingly data dependent, statistics education has emerged as a field of study. Research has focused on statistics course content outcomes, showing most students struggle with statistical concepts, including variation and the standard deviation. Variation is a foundational concept in statistics. Without a firm grasp of…

With online education comes large amounts of data that can reveal in ways able to be examined quantitatively only sparingly in the past, the physics problem-solving profiles of students. This project uses fundamental research to analyze physics problem-solving behavior of students enrolled in the Massive Open Online Course 8.MReVx offered on the…

Based on the findings of a larger study on middle school students' problem solving behaviors, we identified three sub-components for understanding the iteration of unit area in this paper: the mechanism of iteration, an identical unit, and the specificity of the identical unit. A three-stage progression on the acquisition of these components is…

As K-12 mathematics standards shift toward emphasizing both conceptual and procedural knowledge in secondary courses such as algebra and geometry, the struggles for students with disabilities become more pronounced. To address these challenges, research has commonly explored the use of technology to aid in the teaching of students with…

One of the primary skills required by mathematics teachers is the ability to provide effective explanations to their students. Using Kay's (2014) theory-based framework for creating instructional videos, this study explored the quality and growth of explanations embedded in mathematical instructional videos created by 37 pre-service teachers…

This study aims to reveal the fragmentation of thinking structure's students in solving the problems of application definite integral in area. Fragmentation is a term on the computer (storage) that is highly relevant correlated with theoretical constructions that occur in the human brain (memory). Almost every student has a different way to…

Appreciation of problem structure is critical to successful learning. Two experiments investigated effective ways of communicating problem structure in a computer-based learning environment and tested whether verbal instruction is necessary to specify solution steps, when deep structure is already embellished by instructional examples.…

Students often struggle with solving mechanism problems in organic chemistry courses. They frequently focus on surface features, have difficulty attributing meaning to symbols, and do not recognize tasks that are different from the exact tasks practiced. To be more successful, students need to be able to extract salient features, map similarities…

This paper analyses the tasks allotted to students, featuring two thematic units in the 6th grade Geography textbook published in 2018 by the Didactic and Pedagogic Publishing House Ltd., Bucharest and used in the schools in Romania during the 2018-2019 school year. After a brief analysis of the textbook and its lesson structure, we studied the…

This study tested the hypothesis that exploratory learning, with and without analogous problems, would improve students' ability to make connections between conceptually-related topics. In this randomized experiment, undergraduates in introductory physics (N = 171) studied a new topic under three different instructional conditions. Order and type…

Why do people change their strategies for solving problems? In this research, we tested whether negative feedback and the context in which learners encounter a strategy influence their likelihood of adopting that strategy. In particular, we examined whether strategy adoption varied when learners were exposed to a target strategy in isolation, in…

Subjective cognitive load (CL) rating scales are widely used in educational research. However, there are still some open questions regarding the point of time at which such scales should be applied. Whereas some studies apply rating scales directly after each step or task and use an average of these ratings, others assess CL only once after the…

The testing effect occurs when learners who are tested rather than relearning material perform better on a final test than those who relearn. Based on cognitive load theory, it was predicted that the testing effect may not be obtained when the material being learned is high in element interactivity. Three experiments investigated conditions of the…

Physics educators today face two major challenges: supporting the acquisition of a solid base of conceptual knowledge and reducing the persisting gender gap. In the present quasi-experimental study, we investigated the potential of physics instruction that is enriched with evidence-based cognitively activating methods, such as inventing with…