Given growing interest in K-12 data and data science education, new approaches are needed to help students develop robust understandings of and familiarity with data. The model of the "quantified self"--in which data about one's own activities are collected and made into objects of study--provides inspiration for one such approach. By…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Compared Introductory Physical Science (IPS) and Modified approaches to teaching physics concepts. Found that students' preinstruction ideas of matter and density were organized in commonsense theories that constrained understanding of density. Both curricula promoted quantitative understanding of mass, volume, and density, but the Modified…

We present a methodology for designing better learning environments. In Phase 1, 6th-grade students' (n = 223) prior knowledge was assessed using a difficulty factors assessment (DFA). The assessment revealed that scaffolds designed to elicit contextual, conceptual, or procedural knowledge each improved students' ability to add and subtract…