A measure of similarity of educational items has many applications in adaptive learning systems and can be useful also for teachers and content creators. We provide a thorough overview of approaches for measuring item similarity. We document the computation pipeline, explicitly highlighting many choices that have to be made in order to quantify…

Digital design and fabrication tools obtain constraints affecting creativity in conceptual design phase. There is a necessity to have a better understanding of issues related to the rationalization process of form, material and fabrication. The objective of this paper is to integrate analogue craft into architectural design studio that can be…

In the literature related to higher education, the concept of dropout has been approached from several perspectives and, over the years, its definition has been influenced by the use of diversified semantic interpretations. In a general higher education environment dropout can be broadly characterized as the act of a student engaged in a course…

In this article, the authors share how gameplay with dominoes can leverage students' quantitative reasoning to promote number development and additive reasoning. This article explores three domino games (Basic Dominoes, Just Before/Just After, and Ten Train), and considers the following: (1) rules and details; (2) students' subitizing and unit…

Kelley's Discrimination Index (DI) is a simple and robust, classical non-parametric short-cut to estimate the item discrimination power (IDP) in the practical educational settings. Unlike item-total correlation, DI can reach the ultimate values of +1 and -1, and it is stable against the outliers. Because of the computational easiness, DI is…

Structural equation modeling is an ideal data analytical tool for testing complex relationships among many analytical variables. It can simultaneously test multiple mediating and moderating relationships, estimate latent variables on the basis of related measures, and address practical issues such as nonnormality and missing data. To test the…

Secondary students with persistent mathematics difficulties need the most intensive intervention in order to improve their mathematics outcomes. One approach to intensifying and individualizing intervention is through data-based individualization (DBI). The present study used a single-subject, multiple-baseline-across-participants,…

Integrating computational thinking (CT) and science education is complex, and assessing the resulting learning gains even more so. Arguments that assessment should match the learning (Biggs, "Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education," 21(1), 5-16. 1996; Airasian and Miranda, "Theory into Practice," 41(4), 249-254. 2002;…

We propose the first steps towards a rigorous analysis of the effectiveness of an emerging pedagogy, Computational Thinking. We found that two aspects of the pedagogy have a positive effect with regard to enhancing two cognitive processes, namely sequential thinking and in abstract thinking. Our data was gathered experimentally with a cohort of…

Human adults are adept at mitigating the influence of sensory uncertainty on task performance by integrating sensory cues with learned prior information, in a Bayes-optimal fashion. Previous research has shown that young children and infants are sensitive to environmental regularities, and that the ability to learn and use such regularities is…

Computational activity is increasingly relevant in education and society, and researchers have investigated its role in students' mathematical thinking and activity. More work is needed within mathematics education to explore ways in which computational activity might afford development of mathematical practices. In this paper, we specifically…

This work reports the results of a research aimed to know the probabilistic reasoning of high-school students when they deal with the notion of random intervals. An activity was carried out involving students between ages 16 and 17 who built random intervals through physical and computational simulations. The research question guiding this work…

The first purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence of risk for comorbid reading and mathematics disabilities (RMD) at start of first grade, when measured in a representative sample of 3,062 students with first-grade fluency measures (word reading; computation). The second purpose was to examine the utility of these measures for…

The main purpose of this research was to explore the key factors influencing secondary school students' computational thinking skills within the smart classroom environment. Data were collected from 420 students in 4 secondary schools in B city, China. The optimal fitting results of the structural equation model showed that internet attitudes,…

The growing interest of educational researchers in computational thinking (CT) has led to an expanding literature on assessments of CT skills and attitudes. However, few studies have examined whether CT attitudes influence CT skills. The present study examines the relationship between CT attitudes and CT skills for preservice teachers (PSTs). The…