Middle school students (n=144) worked with an applet specially designed to introduce the concept of function without using algebraic representations. The purpose of the study was to examine whether the applet would help students to understand function as a relationship between a set of inputs and a set of outputs and to begin to develop a…

Can critical analysis be carried out without the support of minimal conceptual structuring in the field in question? The results of a research survey of beginning teachers are briefly discussed. Interviews on radiocarbon dating illustrate what we call a "delayed critique", i.e. after a phase of critical passivity and concomitant…

Children's understanding of death has been a topic of interest to researchers investigating the development of children's thinking and clinicians focusing on children's coping with the death of a loved one. Traditionally, researchers in cognitive development have mainly focused on death from a biological perspective. Current research suggests that…

Learning practices in education are constantly evolving to provide high-quality education. One of the trends used to provide high-quality education is incorporating technological tools to teach and learn STEM concepts. Implementing physical manipulative tools and virtual manipulative tools in STEM classrooms positively influenced conceptual…

The goal of this paper is to express necessary conditions for arithmetic in ways that are compatible with the unity of being and knowing understood within first-person experience. In psychological literature, this experience of unity is discussed as flow, but the epistemological and ontological unity is prior to the observer's position from which…

Learning about neural communication can be a dry and challenging undertaking, particularly for students without a background in biology. To enhance learning of this and other STEM material, there has been a call for science educators to embrace the use of active learning techniques. The aim of this Brief Communication is to encourage the use of…

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains;…

Informal learning environments can be a fun and effective means of introducing visitors to a variety of topics in evolution. Our study examined 120 sixth-grade students' conceptualisation of evolutionary ideas following three evolution-themed "Science Days" at 'Nature Campus'--an informal learning environment in Central Israel comprised…

In this research, a new test for understanding simple fractions has been developed for students at the beginning of lower secondary education. In many countries, mathematics education in Grade 5 builds on elementary students' developing concepts of fractions. Understanding fractions causes many difficulties for students, and research on mental…

The aim of this pseudo-longitudinal study is to investigate pre-service teachers' beliefs about (1) the nature of mathematics and (2) mathematics teaching and learning and the development of both beliefs over the course of their studies. A quantitative belief questionnaire was completed by 142 participants divided into three groups based on their…

Sound is one of the most commonly used physical phenomena that most of us use without considering its nature. Moreover, students often face difficulties in understanding acoustic phenomena, the most frequent one of which is the substance-based view of sound instead of a process of pressure and density differences. The current study introduces…

Educational games have demonstrated that they represent valuable pedagogical instruments, which can contribute to teaching and learning in a gratifying environment. In particular in chemistry courses, an important effort has been made to facilitate complex interrelated concepts in an easy, enjoyable, and sometimes competitive way. "Compounds…

The concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) sequence of instruction is an explicit methodology for teaching mathematics using multiple representations of concepts. Learning concepts through multiple representations fosters conceptual understanding and mathematical thinking. This article describes how a special education teacher used explicit CRA…

Problem solving has been the focus of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice. Helping students acquire critical-thinking and problem-solving skills has become the primary goal of mathematics education across all grade levels. However, research has found that many students struggle with word problems because of poor text…

We investigate an interactive teacher-generated drawing strategy in which the teacher constructs a drawing with the help of the students. The students contribute their ideas on how to visualize to-be-drawn concepts, embedded in an interactive process. The present study explored whether learning from a scientific text on plate tectonics could be…