In this article, I argue the proposition that educators ought to be including a serious consideration of intelligent design as a counterexample to the scientific explanations of human origins. The article first distinguishes between three different ways people ask "why": the Scientific Why, the Ultimate Why, and the Teleological Why. Although…

Reduction is a problem-solving strategy, relevant to various areas of computer science, and strongly connected to abstraction: a reductive solution necessitates establishing a connection among problems that may seem totally disconnected at first sight, and abstracts the solution to the reduced-to problem by encapsulating it as a black box. The…

This article gives a general overview of an alternative instructional sequence that can be used to teach integer concepts and operations. The sequence follows three heuristics from Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) that encourage curricula to be reinforced with real-world applications (financial net worth): move students gradually, yet…

The authors shed light on individuals' development of the ability to use thematic and containment relations to organize concepts hierarchically. The authors used a new paradigm calling for the organization of word concepts into a containment-relation-oriented (CRO) hierarchy to collect data from 120 individuals at varied educational levels (Grade…

Many under-prepared university students do not know how to study (Martin and Arendale 1993) because they have not yet developed the abstract reasoning skills that allow them to learn new ideas simply by reading a text or listening to a lecture. This article draws from selected findings from a PhD study currently being undertaken at a university in…

Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder due to microdeletion in chromosome 7, has been described as a syndrome with an intriguing socio-cognitive phenotype. Cognitively, the relative preservation of language and face processing abilities coexists with severe deficits in visual-spatial tasks, as well as in tasks involving…

In this theoretical essay, the author addresses the existence of divergent evidence, portraying both competence and lack of competence in a fundamental realm of higher order thinking--causal and scientific reasoning--and explores the educational implications. Evidence indicates that these higher order reasoning skills are not ones that can be…

Virtual spaces allow abstract representations of reality that not only encourage student self-directed learning but also reinforce core content of the learning objective through visual metaphors not reproducible in the physical world. One of the advantages of such a space is the ability to escape the restrictions of the physical classroom, yet…

Asperger's disorder is one of autistic spectrum disorders; sharing clinical features with autism, but without developmental delay in language acquisition. There have been some studies of intellectual functioning in autism so far, but very few in Asperger's disorder. In the present study, we investigated abstract reasoning ability, whose form of…

This article describes Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), a design theory for mathematics education proposed by Hans Freudenthal and developed over 40 years of developmental research at the Freudenthal Institute for Science and Mathematics Education in the Netherlands. Activities from a unit to develop student understanding of logarithms are…

Developed from Noddings's (2002) care theory, von Glasersfeld's (1995) constructivism, and Ryan and Frederick's (1997) notion of subjective vitality, a mathematical caring relation (MCR) is a quality of interaction between a student and a mathematics teacher that conjoins affective and cognitive realms in the process of aiming for mathematical…

This study examined whether college students are better able to apply knowledge of simple mathematical concepts when they are taught the concepts using abstract symbols or concrete examples. The research described in this article is consistent with What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. Strengths: The study is a well implemented…

We explored the effects of task-related factors on reasoning processes in geometry focusing on a comparison-of-perimeters task in which the irrelevant feature area interferes with the reasoning process. We studied the effects of congruity, salience, and complexity on participants' accuracy of responses and reaction times. The study shows that…

While many researchers in science education have argued that students' epistemological understanding of models and of modelling processes would influence their cognitive processing on a modelling task, there has been little direct evidence for such an effect. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relation between students' epistemological…

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is changing the way we build, operate, and maintain our software-intensive systems. Several projects using MDE practices are reporting significant improvements in quality and performance but, to be able to handle these projects, software engineers need a set of technical and interpersonal skills that are currently…