Students at the junior high school (JHS) level often cannot use their knowledge of physics for explaining and predicting phenomena. We claim that this difficulty stems from the fact that explanations are multi-step reasoning tasks, and students often lack the qualitative problem-solving strategies needed to guide them. This article describes a new…

This study was undertaken in order to better understand prospective elementary school teachers' motivations for working with fractions before and after taking a course designed to deepen their understanding of mathematics, as well as what instructional practices might be related to any changes detected in their motivations. Eighty-five education…

Introduction: In recent decades there has been a well warranted interest in the topic of self-regulated learning, or more recently, in developing the competency "learning how to learn". Research has shown substantial differences between those students and teachers who work along these lines, as compared to others who do not. This paper studies the…

A study was conducted with forty-seven preservice childhood (elementary) education teachers (42 F, 5 M) enrolled in two mathematics methods classes taught by the same instructor to determine the effect of these college students making curriculum materials appropriate for upper elementary students on the preservice teachers' knowledge of…

The washback effect of tests on teaching has attracted considerable attention over recent years, but the critical question of how this translates into washback on learning remains under-explored. To address this issue, questionnaires relating to academic writing instruction were distributed to 108 learners from mainland China preparing for…