The importance of introducing students to mechanistic reasoning (MR) early in their schooling is emphasised in research. The goal of this case study was to contribute with knowledge on how early primary students' (9-10 year-olds) MR in chemistry is expressed and developed in a classroom practice framed by model-based inquiry. The study focuses on…

This paper reports the statistical and probabilistic reasoning of young children in terms of randomness, variability, and data representations in the context of informal inferential reasoning (IIR). Using the IIR approach, a task was designed and conducted one-on-one with 28 children aged 5 to 6 years old, in a case study setting. The researcher…

Findings on children's proportional reasoning abilities strongly vary across studies. This might be due to the different contexts that can be used in proportional problems: fair-sharing, mixtures, and probability. A review of the scientific literature suggests that the context of proportional problems may not only impact the difficulty of the…

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of religious education on Turkish children's "reality status" judgements, reasoning processes and "intercessory beliefs for problem solving." The participants consist of 51 children, 27 of whom are enrolled in a public kindergarten that provides secular education and 24 in…

This research proposes the integration of robotic education and scenario-based learning (SBL) paradigm for teaching computational thinking (CT) to enhance the computational abilities of primary school students, based on digital innovation and a teaching assistant robot acceptance model. The sample group consisted of 532 primary school teachers and…

This study investigated the role of tools in supporting students to reason about even and odd numbers. Participants included Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 students (ages 5-8) at two schools in the USA. Students took part in a cross-sectional early algebra intervention in which they were asked to generalize, represent, justify, and reason with…

Mathematics is crucial to the educational and vocational success of students. The concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) approach is a method to teach students mathematical concepts. The CRA involves instruction with manipulatives, representations, and numbers only in different lessons (i.e., concrete lessons include manipulatives but not…

The authors define two mathematical cognitive verbs which are fundamental to the development of mathematical thinking and reasoning. They distinguish between 'describing' and 'explaining' in relation to doing mathematics, rather than using them interchangeably.

This paper reports from a case study which explores kindergarten children's mathematical abstraction in a teaching--learning activity about reflection symmetry. From a dialectical perspective, abstraction is here conceived as a process, as a genuine part of human activity, where the learner establishes "a point of view from which the concrete…

The need for data literacy is an increasingly pressing priority in society, but most of the work in data-centred education has focused on developing skills at the middle school, secondary, and post-secondary levels, with little attention on the potential for engaging elementary-aged students in reasoning with and about data. This paper reports…

Hypothesis-based reasoning with conditionals is a skill that is required for engaging in integral activities of modern elementary school science-curricula. The teaching of this skill at this early stage of education, however, is demanding, particularly in whole school classes in which it is difficult to adapt teaching to children's individual…

This study examines the collective mathematical reasoning when students and teachers in grades 3, 4, and 5 explore fractions derived from length comparisons, in a task inspired by the Elkonin and Davydov curriculum. The analysis showed that the mathematical reasoning was mainly anchored in mathematical properties related to fractional or algebraic…

Computational thinking requires high cognitive load as students work to manage multiple tasks in their problem-solving environment. Through research in K-2 classrooms on computational thinking, we noticed that students lack the representational fluency needed to move from one form to another--such as moving from physical to more abstract…

Due to their abstract nature, representation of mathematical concepts through different registers favors their understanding. In the case of ''sequences and regularities'', it becomes propitious the exploration of different registers of representation in the institution of topics, such as term, order, formation law, and generating expression.…

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education has been actively implemented around the world recently. ICT curriculum in schools is intended to improve students' programming-oriented thinking rather than to train them as programmers. The core of ICT education is 'computational thinking'. Computational thinking is taking an approach to…