Classroom dialogues have special educational value because they allow students to engage critically but constructively with each other's ideas, solve scientific problems jointly and develop their scientific understanding. The present study focuses on how groups of twelfth-grade high school and university students communicate and co-operate through…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

According to Geary's evolutionary approach, humans are able to easily acquire primary knowledge and, with more efforts, secondary knowledge. The present study investigates how primary knowledge contents can facilitate the learning of formal logical rules, i.e., secondary knowledge. Framing formal logical problems in evolutionary salient contexts…

This article explains four kinds of inquiry exercises, different in purpose, for teaching advanced-level high school and college students the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method. The first uses a picture of a river system to convey the H-D method's logic. The second has teams of students use the H-D method: their teacher poses a hypothesis…

The limit concept plays a foundational role in calculus, appearing in the definitions of the two main ideas of introductory calculus, derivatives and integrals. Previous research has focused on three stages of students' development of limit ideas: the premathematical stage, the introductory calculus stage, and the transition from introductory…

The 21st-century work environment places strong emphasis on nonroutine transversal skills. In an educational context, complex problem solving (CPS) is generally considered an important transversal skill that includes knowledge acquisition and its application in new and interactive situations. The dynamic and interactive nature of CPS requires a…