To better prepare undergraduate students as informed citizens, they need skills to evaluate and interpret scientific data that are relevant to real world scenarios. Socioscientific issues are typically complicated or debatable issues that require individuals to evaluate their background knowledge and make decisions with respect to social and…

In this reflection of teaching, we describe a series of activities that introduce the Taylor series through dynamic visual representations with explicit connections to students' prior learning. Over the past several decades, educators have noted that curricular materials tend to present the Taylor series in a way that students often interpret as…

In Engineering Design education, huge numbers of students are a challenge in university teaching, especially since the students have an initially heterogeneous level of technical knowledge, which influences their acquisition of competences. In frontal classroom lectures, individual deficits can hardly be addressed and in self-study phases,…

This narrative inquiry study explored how emerging elementary educators perceived their understanding of mathematics learning and teaching as they became elementary educators. The study considered how past experiences influenced emerging educators' frames of reference as they began to teach elementary mathematics. Methods consisted of individual…

This study was an attempt to better understand how law faculty search for and create "linkages between subject matter being taught and law students' existing (that is, prior) knowledge and experience." For faculty who do search for and create these linkages, the study can help them understand, and potentially give them access to,…

High-Leverage Practices (HLPs) are a fundamental set of skills teachers should use consistently in the classroom to positively impact both their own capabilities and their students' learning. In our state, the five most important HLPs have been embedded into multiple courses across several educator preparation programs (EPPs). We asked preservice…

Virtual experiments offer opportunities for students to engage in the scientific process and observe scientific phenomena. However, virtual experiments are not always effective for learning. The current study examined how two small manipulations might support better learning from virtual experiments and the extent to which this varied across…

Only a limited number of research has examined preservice preschool teachers' attitudes toward and beliefs about teaching mathematics, likely because there are no instruments aimed at preschool settings that have appropriately established psychometric properties. In the current study, we addressed this deficit and aimed to adapt the Preschool…

Reading is typically guided by a task or goal (e.g., studying for a test, writing a paper). A reader's task awareness arises from their mental representation of the task and plays an important role in guiding reading processes, ultimately influencing comprehension outcomes and task success. As such, a better understanding of how task awareness…

The Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is an artificial intelligence technology that engages in dialogue with humans, capable of generating formulations in the form of micro-narratives that can be problematized as a learning tool in the virtual space. This research aims to understand how ChatGPT can be used in teacher training as a…

Understanding negative numbers can be challenging for many students, as these concepts may seem less tangible than counting objects, which are commonly represented by positive numbers. In addition, the multiplication of two negative numbers resulting in a positive might appear inconsistent and puzzling to young learners who are used to seeing the…

Visuals in picturebooks play an important role in supporting children's reading comprehension and literacy development. This qualitative case study analyzes three American families' shared reading practices at home by analyzing their online surveys for family literacy environments, reading logs for a month, mother interviews, and video observation…

Primary school children frequently use digital devices, which can be infected by computer viruses. In this mixed methods paper with two studies (N = 278 + 114), we examined 8-year-olds' preconceptions about computer viruses and protection against them; how to teach these children about said topics using three different, 30-min-long,…

The relation between mathematical achievement in early childhood and future academic success is well established. However, our knowledge about the effect of instruction on mathematical performance is often reliant upon self-report or videotaped instruction measures and standardized achievement assessments. The current study uses teacher audio…

Background: In example-based learning, examples are often combined with generative activities, such as comparative self-explanations of example cases. Comparisons induce heavy demands on working memory, especially in complex domains. Hence, only stronger learners may benefit from comparative self-explanations. While static text-based examples can…