Background: Virtual laboratories are used to supplement or even replace physical laboratories in engineering education. Although these virtual laboratories allow students to learn foundational experimental skills, they do not provide the learners with the chance to develop higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). Computational thinking (CT) is an…

The Nolan Index (NI) is a normed, quantitative measure for comparing the degree of resemblance (similarity or dissimilarity) between free listings with an Excel program for calculating it. This article enhances that effort with the addition of an R program and additional applications. Free-list resemblance measures have been used to investigate…

In organizational and academic settings, the strategic formation of teams is paramount, necessitating an approach that transcends conventional methodologies. This study introduces a novel application of multicriteria integer programming (MCIP), which simultaneously accommodates multiple criteria, thereby innovatively addressing the complex task of…

Background: In the digital age, fostering young children's computational thinking (CT) and executive functions (EFs) through programming has emerged as a significant research issue. While unplugged programming activities are commonly adopted in preschools, robot programming activities have recently gained attention for the potential to enhance…

Prior research has suggested that clustered regression discontinuity designs are a formidable alternative to cluster randomized designs because they provide targeted treatment assignment while maintaining a high-quality basis for inferences on local treatment effects. However, methods for the design and analysis of clustered regression…

The current study examined how individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders navigate the complexities of learning within multidimensional environments marked by uncertain dimension values and without explicit guidance. Participants engaged in a game-like complex reinforcement learning task in which the stimuli dimension determining reward…

Learning environments for programming education need a comprehensive task set that guides students from basic programming concepts to complex challenges. For creating such a task set, it is beneficial to utilize the concept of a design space--a systematic mapping of design dimensions and choices along these dimensions. We propose an iterative…

Background: Computational thinking (CT) refers to the ability to represent problems, design solutions and migrate solutions computationally. While previous studies have shown that self-explanation can enhance students' learning, few empirical studies have examined the effects of using different self-explanation prompts to cultivate students' CT…

Spreading out study opportunities over time improves the retention of verbal material compared to consecutive study, yet little is known about the influence of temporal spacing on orthographic learning specifically. The current study addressed four questions: (1) do readers' eye movements during orthographic learning differ under spaced and massed…

This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations.…

Nathalie Sinclair's MERGA 2024 keynote challenged us to communicate video data in ways that provide the reader with a more holistic and embodied experience of the data. In this methodological position paper, we take up this challenge. Through video analysis of a pre-school child and her mother engaging about counting in threes (prompted by the…

Bioinformatics and computational biology have become indispensable in modern biological research, yet introductory resources remain scarce. "FILTERED," an innovative online educational tool that introduces high school students to fundamental bioinformatics concepts through engaging puzzle-based gameplay, was developed to address this…

Creativity and computational thinking (CT) have been recognized as crucial skills for the twenty-first century and have been extensively researched in recent years. However, their connections have not yet been fully understood, and there is room to expand the body of knowledge. This study examines the impact of an intervention program to increase…

Meta-analyses have become the gold standard for synthesizing evidence from multiple clinical trials, and they are especially useful when outcomes are rare or adverse since individual trials often lack sufficient power to detect a treatment effect. However, when zero events are observed in one or both treatment arms in a trial, commonly used…

This study explores the influence of schools' general characteristics, and their information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities on students' computational thinking. The computational thinking achievements of 31,823 students who participated in a large-scale comparative study in 1412 schools and across nine countries/regions were…