In my Keynote Address to PME-NA 45, I offer an embodied framework for naming what makes mathematics powerful for mathematicians and scientists, yet intractable for many learners. The essential claim is this: Students reside in the Real World, where math is grounded, embodied and meaningful, while mathematics resides in the ungrounded, disembodied…

This study aimed to examine the effect of four types of assessment on overall student success in an online college-level climate change course. Quizzes, midterms, lab assignments, and a capstone project as well as knowledge check questions were used to assess different aspects of student learning, consistent with Bloom's taxonomy hierarchy.…

Playing games holds an important role in learning and development. While designing and using digital game-based learning (DGML) environments becomes more appealing to educators, there is a disconnect between the goals that educators try to achieve and the design strategies they utilize to achieve their goals. The inclusion of game elements alone…

Problem-solving skills in creative, open-ended domains are both important and little understood. These domains are generally ill-structured, have extremely large exploration spaces, and require high levels of specialized skill in order to produce quality solutions. We investigate problem-solving behavior in one such domain, the…

Based on a detailed reading of Graham Wallas' "Art of Thought" (1926) it is argued that his four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification), in spite of holding sway as a conceptual anchor for many creativity researchers, does not reflect accurately Wallas' full account of the creative…

Arthur Cropley (2006) emphasized the critical place that convergent thinking has in creativity. Although he briefly refers to the blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity, his discussion could not reflect the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in BVSR, especially the resulting combinatorial models.…

This is the fourth paper in our Light-Emitting Diodes series. The series aims to create a systematic library of LED-based materials and to provide readers with the description of experiments and the pedagogical treatment that would help their students construct, test, and apply physics concepts and mathematical relations. The first paper provided…

Collaborative learning has attracted attention as pedagogic mediation to assist learners' corpus consultation, but some studies have pointed to negative aspects of collaboration. Based on the two sides of collaboration in language learning, this study presents a qualitative investigation of different effects of collaboration depending on task…

Design-thinking is an inductive and participatory process in which designers are required to manage constraints, generate solutions, and follow project timelines in order to complete project goals. The researchers used this exploration study to look at how designers in various disciplinary fields approach design projects. Designers were asked to…

Discover the secrets contained in fossilized feces. Few topics in middle school classrooms capture students' enthusiasm and interest as do coprolites. These trace fossils offer classroom opportunities for integrated life and Earth sciences study, a stranger-than-fiction history of science, and an opportunity to solve mysteries. (Contains 8…

This study evaluated whether schema-based instruction (SBI), a promising method for teaching students to represent and solve mathematical word problems, impacted the learning of percent word problems. Of particular interest was the extent that SBI improved high- and low-achieving students' learning and to a lesser degree on the indirect effect of…

Simulation games are now increasingly applied to many subject domains as they allow students to engage in discovery processes, and may facilitate a flow learning experience. However, the relationship between learning experiences and problem solving strategies in simulation games still remains unclear in the literature. This study, thus, analyzed…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Targeted as a highly desired skill for contemporary work and life, problem solving is central to game-based learning research. In this study, middle grade students achieved significant learning gains from gameplay interactions that required solving a science mystery based on microbiology content. Student trace data results indicated that effective…

In this note we develop a framework that makes explicit the inherent dynamic structure of certain mathematical definitions by means of the four facets of context-entity-process-object. These facets and their interrelations are then used to capture and interpret specific aspects of student constructions of the concept of solution to first order…