The investigations described in the ten fascinating research studies contained in the current volume of "ZDM Mathematics Education" evoke some perspectives in response. I consider the articles thematically in relation to a suggested set of important or pressing questions about creativity and giftedness in mathematics education, grouped…

Spatial thinking is important for success in engineering. However, little is known about "how" students learn and apply spatial skills, particularly in kindergarten to Grade 12 engineering learning. The present study investigated the role of spatial thinking in engineering learning at a middle school summer camp. Participants were 26…

Mastering the ability to construct and manipulate Lewis structures is an important first step along the journey to reaching representational competence. Lewis structures serve as a convenient organizational scheme that can help students to scaffold their chemical knowledge and help them to apply it to predict a variety of physical and chemical…

According to cognitive load theory, using worked examples is an effective and efficient instructional strategy for initial cognitive skill acquisition for novice learners, as it reduces cognitive load and frees up cognitive resources to build task competence. Contrary to this, productive failure (as well as invention learning, desirable…

In some cases difficult-to-read learning materials lead to better performance than easy to-read materials. This phenomenon is called the disfluency effect and is attributed to a subjective feeling of task difficulty resulting in a deeper learning approach. In two studies (n[subscript 1] = 67, n[subscript 2] = 73) we investigated the impact of…

Textbooks in applied mathematics often use graphs to explain the meaning of formulae, even though their benefit is still not fully explored. To test processes underlying this assumed multimedia effect we collected performance scores, eye movements, and think-aloud protocols from students solving problems in vector calculus with and without graphs.…

In our study, we tested the hypothesis that feature-based and rule-based generalization involve different types of processes that may affect each other producing different results depending on time constraints and on how generalization is measured. For this purpose, participants in our experiments learned cue-outcome relationships that followed…

Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to share and use verbal instructions to prepare for upcoming tasks. Recent research showed that instructions are sufficient for the automatic, reflex-like activation of responses. However, systematic studies into the limits of these automatic effects of task instructions remain relatively…

College is considered to be one of the most evaluative and stressful times during a student's academic career. A student's inability to regulate emotions may be correlated with an increased level of test anxiety. Previous research has indicated significant relationships between emotional dysregulation and generalized anxiety disorders (e.g.,…

Making sense of theory plays an essential role in the life of a doctoral student. This autoethnographic study explores how I made sense of educational theory while conceptualizing the theoretical framework for my PhD proposal. A diary that I kept while designing the proposal serves as the data source to examine how my thinking about theory…

Recoverability refers to the ease of recovering the underlying form--stored mental representations--given a surface form--actual, variable output signals s (e.g., [Daet^, Daet[superscript h] ] ? /Daet/ "that"). Recovery can be achieved from phonetic cues explicitly present in the acoustic signal or through prediction from the context.…

This dissertation explores the area of student engagement. Precisely, the dissertation attempts to find out the importance, roles, significance and factors involved in online student engagement and their consequences in achieving a positive learning environment. The first stream of inquiry investigated the perceived links between students'…

Classroom role-play is an interactive learning technique with a long history of success, but current attempts to augment it with technology limit the very interactions that make this technique successful. For example, digital roleplay games often engage individual students at a computer, rather than creating rich social interactions among…

Context: Learning how to form accurate and efficient clinical examinations is a critical factor in becoming a competent athletic training practitioner, and instructional strategies differ for this complex task. Objective: To introduce an instructional strategy consistent with complex learning to encourage improved efficiency by minimizing…

The cognitive conflict hypothesis asserts that information that directly contradicts a prior conception is 1 of the prerequisites for conceptual change and other forms of nonmonotonic learning. There have been numerous attempts to support this hypothesis by adding a conflict intervention to learning scenarios with weak outcomes. Outcomes have been…