This study examined the use of analogy in architectural design. Its main goal was to provide an understanding of how experts and novices alike used visual analog thinking to generate satisfactory solutions during their design process. A series of controlled experiments were conducted in order to examine how this cognitive strategy contributes to…

Background: Coding has become an integral part of STEM education. However, novice learners face difficulties in processing codes within embedded structures (also termed nested structures). This study aimed to investigate the cognitive mechanism underlying the processing of embedded coding structures based on hierarchical complexity theory, which…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

This study explores the perceptions of early career STEM faculty about their teaching contexts and praxis after pursuing an accredited teaching and learning programme in an Irish university. A social realist approach using Archer's morphogenetic framework was employed to facilitate an exploration of their perceptions about teaching and the…

A replication study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of an instructional treatment based on self-efficacy theory when used with novice Arduino microcontroller users. Students (n = 32) in an introductory university agricultural systems technology course participated in a lesson on Arduino microcontrollers, circuit breadboarding, and…

Computational thinking is an important competence for learners in the twenty-first century. As an effective approach for cultivating competence in computational thinking, programming education has been extended from college to elementary school teaching. However, it is challenging to engage beginners in programming in elementary school education.…

Novice teachers often report feeling unprepared for their teaching positions, even after completing a real-time student teaching experience. Novice teacher efficacy has been found to decrease over the course of the first year of teaching, and does not return to its pre-teaching level for three years. The purpose of this sequential mixed methods…

Visual (perceptual) reasoning is a critical skill in many medical specialties, including pathology, diagnostic imaging, and dermatology. However, in an ever-compressed medical curriculum, learning and practicing this skill can be challenging. Previous studies (including work with pigeons) have suggested that using reward-feedback-based activities,…

Novice programmers often encounter difficulties performing debugging tasks effectively. Even if modern development environments (IDEs) provide high-level support for navigating through code elements and for identifying the right conditions leading to the bug, debugging still requires considerable human effort. Programmers usually have to make…

Theorists and educators increasingly highlight the importance of computational thinking in STEM education. While various scaffolding strategies describe how to best support this skillset (i.e., paired programming, worked examples), less research has focused on the design and development of these digital tools. One way to support computational…

Professional development in policy for K-12 teachers is relatively rare despite the indelible role that teachers play in policy implementation. This study describes the experiences of five teachers who completed the 10-month Texas Education Policy Fellowship Program. Results showed that the experienced classroom teachers garnered the most policy…

This research investigates how a mobile-based archive application and digital literacy impact pre-service administrators' understanding of the smart village concept in rural governance. It uses a quantitative approach with a questionnaire given to 100 pre-service administrators to evaluate their attitudes towards these factors. Validity and…

Instructional designers and professional trainers conduct many different types of training. However, some topics are job- and- task-specific and are more effectively taught by subject matter expert (SME) trainers. In some cases, these SMEs are given training and/or instructional design (ID) resources, and in other cases they have to learn best…

The complexity of interdisciplinary research, including the time needed to understand multiple approaches and develop skills, within a university structure organised in disciplines, means that interdisciplinary research can be difficult for a developing researcher. However, early- and mid-career researchers (EMCRs) are key to the future of…

This article reports on how four faculty self-study learning group members reexperienced the newness of teaching when forced to move online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a collaborative self-study of experienced teacher educators, we explored our abrupt transitions in teaching over one year through journal entries and individual interviews…