This study is the first to examine the associations between the occurrence, frequency, and adaptivity of children's subtraction by addition strategy use (SBA; e.g., 712 - 346 = ?; 346 + 54 = 400, 400 + 300 = 700, 700 + 12 = 712, and 54 + 300 + 12 = 366) and their underlying conceptual knowledge. Specifically, we focused on two rarely studied…

Mind mapping is a powerful technique that is often used for teaching declarative knowledge, but seldom implemented to record procedural knowledge. The present study focused on the latter. During a 12-week public presentation course, self-developed mind mapping software was utilized as a learning tool and an instrument to collect and analyze user…

Sensemaking is conceptualized as a trajectory to develop better understanding and is advocated as one of the fundamental practices in science education. However, the field is lacking of a framework to view the prolonged process of sensemaking that starts from a raise of uncertainty of a target phenomenon to a grasping of a better understanding of…

Keto-enol tautomerization is paramount to understanding the mechanisms involved in many organic reactions and biochemical transformations. Isomerization of an enol to a carbonyl compound is typically introduced during the discussion of the acid-catalyzed electrophilic addition of water to alkynes. The tautomerization of carbonyl compounds to enol…

Creativity is typically defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas or artifacts. This generative capacity is crucial to everyday problem solving, technological innovation, scientific discovery, and the arts. A central concern of cognitive scientists is to understand the processes that underlie human creative thinking. We review evidence…

The "Global Best Practices" concept is subjective and varies from many perspectives based on the indicators used. As such, there needs to be a standardized and universally accepted definition of global best practices in education, which hinders the effective identification, adoption, and benchmarking of these practices across countries…

Generic sentences such as "Birds lay eggs" are used frequently and effortlessly, but there is no simple quantitative rule that determines whether they are true or false. For instance, while "Birds lay eggs" is considered true, "Birds are female" is considered false, even though there are necessarily fewer birds that…

There is an infinity of realized and potential creative things, creative ideas, and creative performances, and yet there is no such thing as creativity, at least not in the two ways most of us think about creativity. (1) There is no general essence of creativity, no indispensable factor or shared quality that is an intrinsic part of all creative…

In our rush to get to deeper learning, it's easy to undervalue the essential role that "shallow" understanding (e.g., basic factual knowledge) plays in students' capacity to explore and understand content more fully, write Kevin Krahenbuhl and John Lando Carter. In this article, they outline three strategies to ensure students have a…

Urine formation in the nephron can be a very intimidating concept to students. This straightforward activity, performed by students during the nephron lecture, can help enforce the concepts as they uncover the structures and functions involved in urine formation.

This study explores the ontological perspective in analyzing students' problem-solving related to mechanical energy conservation. The research involves 18 high school students whose explanations were qualitatively analyzed using an extended ontological framework. Initially, students predominantly employed matter-based predicates and…

For several decades, brainstorming in groups and its variants have been widely examined in research as a technique to produce ideas. The way to stimulate elaboration by linking ideas to those previously given by others during a brainstorming session is a challenge for researchers and practitioners aiming to go beyond idea generation. Despite…

As environmental challenges increase in scope and scale, new conceptualizations for environmental literacy are needed. Specifically, notions of environmental literacy must move from those at the individual level to those at the group, or community, level. However, the concept of community level environmental literacy is underdeveloped. In this…

This paper critically assesses the meaning of Indigenous Knowledge from a global context. Using content analysis of myriad descriptions of the concept and quasi-quantitative statistical techniques, this study examines the global elements that should be used to characterize Indigenous Knowledge. This is prompted by the fact that for decades,…

Mathematical ideas are developed and spread during argumentative whole class discussions between a teacher and her students. The goal of the current study is to characterize how ideas about quadratic functions emerge and are spread during a whole-class discussion among ninth graders. To this end, we recorded both discussions between pairs of…