Data is everywhere, but not always accessible to everyone. Conventional data visualization tools and guidelines often assume a standard user, neglecting the neurodivergent needs of individuals with cognitive disabilities. These disabilities can create significant obstacles in data-driven reasoning, including difficulties in processing complex…

An essential understanding of the uses and practices of algebra remain out of reach for many students. In this book, award-winning researcher Dr. Nicole Fonger addresses the issue of how to support all learners to experience algebra as meaningful. In a highly visual approach, the book details four research-based lenses with examples from 9th-grade…

Experiential learning is fundamental to agricultural education. Current literature indicates some methods of pedagogically implementing experiential learning are more effective than others. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of reflection type and abstraction order on content knowledge and content knowledge retention when…

This is an article about abstraction, generalization, and the beauty of mathematics. We claim that abstraction and generalization in of itself may very well be a beauty of the human mind. The fact that we humans continue to explore and expand mathematics is truly beautiful and remarkable. Many years ago, our ancestors understood that seven stones,…

Binary operations are one of the fundamental structures underlying our number and algebraic systems. Yet, researchers have often left their role implicit as they model student understanding of abstract structures. In this paper, we directly analyze students' perceptions of the general binary operation via a two-phase study consisting of task-based…

Teaching with analogies is an important pedagogy that helps learners construct abstract conceptions through reasoning with something familiar. Heat concepts were chosen for this study because they have an intangible nature and involve complex mechanisms that often challenge school-aged learners. Learning this kind of complex concept with analogies…

Echoing the increasing emphasis on STEM literacy, computational thinking has become a national priority in K-12 schools. Scholars have acknowledged abstraction as the keystone of computational thinking. To foster K-12 students' computational thinking and STEM literacy, students' ability to think abstractly should be enhanced. However, the existing…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…

Understanding fraction as a quantity has been identified as a key developmental understanding. In this study, students in Grades 5, 8, and 11 were asked to compare the areas of two halves of the same square--a rectangle and a right triangle. Findings from this study suggest that students who understand fraction as a quantity use reasoning related…

Research on student argumentation in chemistry laboratories has mainly focused on evaluating the quality of students' arguments and analyzing the structure of such arguments ("i.e." claims, evidence, and rationale). Despite advances in these areas, little is known about the impact of activity framing on the nature of student…

Critical and analytical thinking skills are included in higher-order thinking skills which become the focus of educational goals in recent era. This study aimed to determine the relationship between critical and analytical thinking skills in ecology learning at senior high school in East Jakarta. This research was conducted from March to June…

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children's ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure…

In this dissertation, I explore ways to support secondary school students' meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. Specifically, I investigate how students co-developed representational fluency (RF) and functional thinking (FT), when they gained meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. I also characterize students' co-emergence of…

The impact of the role a secondary school leader plays in the daily lives of our students is one that must be acknowledged. It is important to study the decision-making process to ensure our leaders continue to grow and acquire the necessary skills to make their role one that has a positive impact. This is especially important since school leaders…

Item recognition and temporal order memory follow different developmental trajectories during middle childhood, with item recognition performance stabilizing and temporal order memory performance continuing to improve. We investigated the potential unique role of individual executive functions on item recognition and temporal order memory during…