Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best…

"The Most Reasonable Answer" is an innovative and comprehensive guide to engaging students in inquiry dialogue--a type of talk used in text-based classroom discussions. During inquiry dialogue, students collectively search for the most reasonable answers to big, controversial questions, and, as a result, enhance their argumentation…

In our work in environmental education (EE) as part of formal schooling we partnered with local schools to explore the practice of embedding, or integrating EE within formal school curriculum using inquiry-based pedagogies. In this paper we report on and discuss our growing understanding of the practice of pedagogical documentation and the…

Informal statistical inference has now been researched at all levels of schooling and initial tertiary study. Work in informal statistical inference is least understood in the early years, where children have had little if any exposure to data handling. A qualitative study in Australia was carried out through a series of teaching experiments with…

"Making" represents an increasingly popular label for describing a form of engineering design. While making is growing in popularity, there are still open questions about the strategies that students are using in these activities. Assessing and improving learning in making/ engineering design contexts require that we have a better…

"Modeling Mathematical Ideas" combining current research and practical strategies to build teachers and students strategic competence in problem solving.This must-have book supports teachers in understanding learning progressions that addresses conceptual guiding posts as well as students' common misconceptions in investigating and…

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of a "National Statement on Mathematics for Australian Schools", which was the first curriculum statement this country had including "Chance and Data" as a significant component. It is hence an opportune time to survey the history of the related statistics education…

Science is of critical importance to daily life in a knowledge society and has a significant influence on many everyday decisions. As scientific problems increase in their number and complexity, so do the challenges facing the public in understanding these issues. Our objective is to focus on 3 of those challenges: the challenge of reasoning about…

Among the many difficulties beleaguering the communication research methods instructor is the problem of contextualizing abstract ideas. Comprehension of variable operationalization, the utility of the measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, and the visual distribution of data sets are difficult, since students have not handled data.…

Current adolescent literacy rates cause concerns at the number of students who graduate high school with basic or below-basic reading skills. The Common Core State Standards promote disciplinary literacy, which presents advanced literacy skills embedded in content area instruction. Disciplinary literacy is argued as a way to raise adolescent…

This document presents the proceedings of the 24th Annual Research Forum held June 27, 2019, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following eleven action research papers: (1) How Does Student Goal Setting Affect Motivation to Learn? (Wendell Dunn); (2) Combatting Confirmation Bias: How Writing from Opposing…

Previous cross-cultural research using false-belief tasks has explored whether children's theory of mind develops synchronously across cultures. Success on false-belief tasks is usually interpreted as an important indicator of children's mental state understanding, but inconsistent findings have led to questions regarding the interpretation of…

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims presented with or without related but nonprobative photos, the photos tend to inflate the subjective truth of those claims--a "truthiness" effect (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people more often judged the claim "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" to…

A dynamic assessment tool was developed and validated using Mokken scale analysis to assess the extent to which kindergartners are able to construct unconfounded experiments, an essential part of scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning is one of the learning processes happening within science education. A commonly used, hands-on,…

The study of formal logic helps to improve the process of thinking and tries to refine and improve the thinking ability. The objectives of this study are to know the effectiveness of formal logic course and to determine the critical thinking variables that are effective and that are ineffective. A sample of 214 students is selected from all the…