There has been a long-standing debate on situational and symbolic mathematics, which is associated with how to design and execute mathematics education for all students. Brain studies can give some clues for how to deal with the debate. There are situational, verbalized, and visuospatial brain networks and the connectivity among the networks,…

In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent…

Do young children understand the complex mathematics in the petals of a daisy, the Fibonacci sequence in the spiral of a pinecone, the fractal geometry in the leaves of a fern, or the "golden ratio" in the seed pattern of a sunflower? Probably not, but they certainly can observe and recognize the patterns and compare them to similar…

Engineering educators strive to help students understand concepts that may be difficult and counterintuitive. This often entails helping students bring their understanding of how a phenomenon works into alignment with the scientifically-accepted explanation. For the most part, fostering conceptual change has been thought of as a process of…

Understanding of fractions is difficult for Indonesian students. This often leads to misinterpretation in solving fractional problems. In this study, a task aiming at identifying students' struggles in understanding the basic concept of part-whole relationships in fractions was developed and tested with six 4th-grade students. The task uses…

In this study we explore how incorporating an arts-based pedagogical approach, specifically, the use of film, art, and music, into a second-year sociological theory course enhances students' overall learning experiences. We report on data collected from a survey given to students enrolled in this course in 2020. Findings reveal that employing this…

Design-based learning is considered a powerful way to help students apply and develop understanding of science concepts, but research has shown that the success of this approach is not a given. Examining students' understanding of science concepts in various design-based learning contexts has thus continued to be an important field of research. To…

In mathematics education, researchers often contrast conceptual and procedural teaching approaches, although labels and conceptualizations often vary across studies. Prior research has extensively examined empirical relationships between the two teaching approaches and mathematics achievement. In our study, we aimed to extend this research by…

The aim of this paper is to present a teaching proposal for the theoretical part relating to the first- and second-order linear difference equations with constant coefficients suitable for the first-year students at various types of universities. In contradistinction to the methods often applied (memorization of algorithms without a proper…

In many science and engineering undergraduate programmes, physics courses are fundamental and can be seen as a potential place where students can develop complementary abilities such as the computational thinking process. The present work proposes and describes the learning science and engineering with electronic spreadsheets cycle (LSEESC)…

This paper introduces the special section on Cora Diamond's significance for education and educators. The introduction is meant to be the beginning of a conversation, and--to that end--the special section editors suggest lines of connections that philosophers of education might draw between their work and the work of Cora Diamond. Their list is…

Resonance is a fundamental chemistry concept first introduced to students in General Chemistry I (GCI), reintroduced in Organic Chemistry I (OCI), and then utilized throughout other higher-level chemistry courses. Student difficulties with resonance are well documented. Instruction is one potential source of student difficulties. What instructors…

This study attempted to examine the impacts of conceptual and perceptual primes on the word recognition and sentence comprehension of beginner, intermediate and advanced EFL learners. Consequently, 246 EFL learners were recruited for study and categorized into three English proficiency levels. The needed data was collected via Lexical Decision…

This study contributes to the call for influencing practice by increasing attention to how learning environments can be designed to support learning in statistical inference. We report on a design experiment in secondary school (students 14-16 years old), that resulted in a set of lessons with the learning goal of teaching students how to apply…

An understanding of the equal sign is a fundamental concept for early algebra. While literature claimed that Chinese students commonly master the relational understanding of the equal sign in the elementary school, these claims are under-researched. This study used the Mathematics Equivalence Assessment with 237 Chinese Grade 5 students. The…