Theorists and educators increasingly highlight the importance of computational thinking in STEM education. While various scaffolding strategies describe how to best support this skillset (i.e., paired programming, worked examples), less research has focused on the design and development of these digital tools. One way to support computational…

In honours programmes, teachers face the task of designing courses in which students feel challenged and learn from accomplishing demanding assignments. The aim of this study was to investigate students' and teachers' perceptions of challenge and learning in an honours programme. From 2016 to 2019, students and teachers rated the learning…

The aim of this study is to investigate the public opinion (i.e., the learners themselves) of apps incorporating emerging technologies Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) and find out how satisfied mobile platform users are with these technologies for educational purposes. We performed sentiment analysis of more than one million…

Not enough attention is paid to the instructional design decisions that define students' experiences. Lisa Dover Kingsley and Jennifer Perry Cheatham contend that while quality teaching is crucial, the structural decisions supporting meaningful engagement often go unexamined. Using innovations in North Kansas City, Missouri, as a throughline, they…

Active learning approaches to biology teaching, including simulation-based activities, are known to enhance student learning, especially of higher-order skills; nonetheless, there are still many open questions about what features of an activity promote optimal learning. Here we designed three versions of a simulation-based tutorial called…

Background: Driven by the ongoing need to provide high-quality learning and teaching, universities recently have shown an increased interest in using learning analytics (LA) for improving learning design (LD). However, the evidence of such improvements is scarce, and the maturity of such research is unclear. Objectives: This study is aimed to…

The purpose of this descriptive article was to illustrate the process of using constructive alignment in redesigning an introductory gross anatomy unit that is taught specifically to sports science and physical education students at Victoria University. The unit was redesigned as an intensive learning unit in 2017 as part of a broader…

Virtual reality (VR) in education has tremendous potential in providing immersive and interactive experiences for students. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technologies and IVR learning experiences have been increasingly used in education settings to support a variety of instructional methods and outcomes by providing experiential and authentic…

The present study, carried out in the context of a Teacher Professional Development (TPD) Program on mathematical modelling and digital technologies, focuses on how Italian mathematics teachers refer to digital technologies in designing their lessons and investigates to what extent the TPD program impacted the way by which teachers design their…

The Framework for K-12 Science Education set an ambitious goal of broadening participation in science learning for all students. Meeting this vision will involve supporting teachers in making meaningful connections with the cultural and linguistic resources their students bring to school; in essence, developing pedagogies that frame these…

Promoting progressive discourse and sustained inquiry is a focus area of knowledge building research. Although different approaches for scaffolding productive discourse have been documented, the experimental investigation into the impact of teacher scaffolding on students' knowledge building processes and outcomes in technology-supported…

Assessment for Learning (AfL) is complex requiring teacher competences for collecting, analysing and interpreting evidence of student progress, and for adapting instruction and learning accordingly. In this study, the four-component instructional design (4C/ID) model for complex learning was used to design a teacher professional development (TPD)…

Teacher design teams (TDTs) are professional learning communities in which teachers collaborate to (re)design innovative educational materials. When appropriately supported, TDT work stimulates the explication and use of pedagogical content knowledge, thus providing important opportunities for teachers to learn from one another. However, TDT…

This is an empirical, ethnographic study about middle school students' mathematical joy in a formal math classroom. This study is situated in a year-long Research Practice Partnership with 6th grade mathematics teacher and 21 students in her 3rd block class. Through this collaboration, the teacher and I sought to design tasks to support students'…

Children and young people live in a world that is constantly changing. In order to master their lives successfully, they will need many skills and competences. These include mathematical competences, which they should build up from primary school age. This article deals with the question of how mathematics lessons should be designed in order to…