Many universities, especially in low-income countries, have considered the potential of cloud-supported collaborative learning in planning and managing students' learning experiences. This is because cloud tools can offer students the necessary skills for collaboration with one another and improving communication between all users. This study…

Children hold rich essentialist beliefs about natural and social categories, representing them as discrete (mutually exclusive with sharp boundaries) and stable (with membership remaining constant over an individual's lifespan). Children use essential categories to make inductive inferences about individuals. How do children determine what…

In this work we study the motion of a small metal ball along an inclined multi-slotted track. Specifically, the effect of the slot width on the ball speed at the lower part of the track is analyzed in detailed both analytically and experimentally. Experimental results are in satisfactory agreement with the theoretical model.

Research on productive failure suggests that attempting to solve a problem prior to instruction facilitates conceptual understanding compared to receiving instruction prior to problem solving. The assumptions are that during the problem-solving phase, students activate their prior knowledge, become aware of their knowledge gaps, and discover deep…

This paper describes an experiment with two touching rotating disks, whose movement is followed by video analysis. Within the disks' movements, there are intervals with sliding and intervals without sliding, that is, intervals with frictional forces between the touching surfaces and intervals without it. This system configuration allows for…

How do children reason about the durations of daily experiences? Following Tillman and Barner's (2015) linguistic study, three children (age five, six, and seven) were asked to organize four everyday activities from the shortest duration to longest duration: watching a movie, brushing their teeth, sleeping at night, and eating lunch. After…

As well as knowledge structures can be complex and coherent, they might be small and disconnected. This study focuses on knowledge elements of pre-service teachers using diSessa's phenomenological primitives (p-prims) framework. Based on group interviews, a test was developed regarding the knowledge fragments used for explaining free fall in three…

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional…

Grade 8 students were given a task that had pairs of shapes that had been transformed (i.e., preimages and images). Students were to identify which of the three rigid transformations--reflections, rotations, or translations--were used to map the preimage to the image. Students were also asked to give a justification for their choice of…

This paper focuses on determining the opinions of primary school third-grade pupils about the conceptual meaning and use of the numbers "0" and "1". The current study employed the case study design, which is one of the qualitative research methods. In the selection of the sample, the criterion sampling method, one of the…

Higher professional education aims to prepare students for professional practice, for which students will need to develop conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires a synthesis of relevant facts, theories and practices. This research explores what types of change take place in students' conceptual understanding during a bachelor…

This study explores the dynamic, interactive nature of digital drawings and writing in a knowledge building community in which students used a multimedia online environment--Knowledge Forum--to represent and advance ideas in the field of optics. The research employs a mixed-methods case study to collect and analyze multimedia notes created by 22…

Mechanical engineering students often find the formulation and analysis of dynamical systems difficult. The response of some mechanical engineering undergraduates is that as much as possible courses on mechanics are best avoided. The aim of this paper is to produce some interesting dynamical systems that may help to change the opinions of the…

The aim of this paper is to narrate a significant part of the experience of a professor over several semesters teaching fundamental ideas of the "Theory of Calculus." The narrative explains how his didactic and mathematical mentality evolved as he witnessed students' conceptual difficulties, as they were confronted with situations that…

The present study investigates how emerging/young and established/expert artists create artwork, paying special attention to modifications in the art-making process. Here, "process modification" is the means by which artists generate new artistic concepts by modifying elements of their previous artwork. To examine whether emerging…