This study describes how students' intuitions about sampling are informed by extended experiences in investigating local ecosystems. Elementary students in a rural/suburban district in the upper midwest spent a year conducting first-hand comparative field studies of nearby ponds, prairies, and forests. At the close of the term, we conducted…

There is a widening college access gap in the United States. The ever-rising cost of higher education, coupled with diminished government financial support and growing income inequality, have put college out of reach for many at a critical juncture when postsecondary education is essential for enhancing career prospects. The situation has been…

This article discusses the nature of implicit knowledge, something which is considered to be highly influential in learning. The notion of implicit knowledge is important in conceptualising studies exploring student thinking and learning in chemistry, and in considering how the results of such studies should be interpreted to inform teaching.…

The emergence of a proof image is often an important stage in a learner's construction of a proof. In this paper, we introduce, characterize, and exemplify the notion of proof image. We also investigate how proof images emerge. Our approach starts from the learner's efforts to construct a justification without (or before) attempting any…

We highlight some important conceptual issues that biologists should take into account when teaching evolutionary biology or communicating it to the public. We first present conclusions from conceptual development research on how particular human intuitions, namely design teleology and psychological essentialism, influence the understanding of…

A clinical psychologist and consulting psychotherapist discusses how elements of play, inherent in the intuition required in analysis, can provide a cornerstone for serious therapeutic work. She argues that many aspects of play--its key roles in human development, individual growth, and personal creativity, among others--can help therapists and…

For the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of job opportunities in the computing field. As a result, many schools and universities are facing a significant increase in the number of students seeking to major in one of several computing disciplines. This increase in the numbers and variety of majors in the computing field…

Cambodia has in the past 15 years been catching up with the global and regional trends of rapid expansion of higher education, but its specific socio-historical context has engendered particular life course and societal implications. Engaging with the current policy attention to the cause of skills mismatch in Cambodia, this article aims to…

This inquiry presents two fine-grained case studies of students demonstrating different levels of cognitive functioning in relation to bilateral symmetry and reflection. The two students were asked to solve four sets of tasks and articulate their reasoning in task-based interviews. The first participant, Brittany, focused essentially on three…

How do architecture students experience the contradictions between the individual and the group at the Department of Architecture and Design of Aalborg University? The Problem-Based Learning model has been extensively applied to the department's degree programs in coherence with the Integrated Design Process, but is a group-based architecture and…

While both insight and divergent thinking tasks are used to study creativity, there are reasons to believe that the two may call upon very different mechanisms. To explore this hypothesis, we administered a verbal insight task (riddles) and a divergent thinking task (verbal fluency) to 16 native English speakers and 16 non-native English speakers…

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by "all," "most," and…

Many educational tools that are recommended for the training of normal students are often encountered in programs that do not work very well and are subsequently abandoned. One of the important points that program developers should now consider is that teaching tools are presented in accordance with individual differences. It is seen that the…

The term of implicit learning is still subject to controversy. "At least a dozen different definitions have been offered in the field" (Frensch & Rünger, 2003 p.13). While some scholars consider it downright inexistent (see Chun & Jiang, 1998), many others are trying to identify how we seem to acquire knowledge in absence of…

The advances of modern biotechnology provide teachers with a number of opportunities to explore socioscientific issues, and in doing so to enhance students' reasoning skills. Although some attempt has been made to understand cultural differences in students' informal reasoning across international and regional boundaries, there is limited research…