Engaging in the construction and interpretation of graphs is a complex process involving concerted activation of context-specific cognitive resources. As students engage in this process, they apply fine-grained, intuitive ideas to graphical patterns: graphical forms. Using data involving pairs of students constructing and interpreting graphs, we…

Functions are an essential concept in mathematics. The studies that have examined functions in advanced contexts have primarily focused on students' reasoning about specific types of functions (such as binary operations and isomorphisms) but not on the core characteristics of well-definedness and everywhere-definedness. Here, we report on a study…

Meta-reasoning requires monitoring and controlling one's reasoning processes, and it often begins with an assessment of problem solvability. We explored whether "Judgments of Solvability (JOS)" for solvable and unsolvable anagrams discriminate and predict later problem-solving outcomes once anagrams solved during the JOS task are…

Humans excel at detecting patterns in information, abstracting rules, and making inferences. Underlying these skills is relational reasoning: the cognitive ability to identify and map abstract, generalizable relations between pieces of information. Though this powerful ability supports higher-order cognition, it can also be a processing bottleneck…

Education experts Jim Heal and Bryan Goodwin explain that students should be able to think deeply about their learning, not just appear to be engaged. The authors differentiate between student thinking and engagement and offer educators practical strategies to deepen learning and ensure it sticks.

In this exploratory study, we investigated students' design thinking strategies during a challenge involving the design of an energy-efficient house. We used the Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix as a framework for characterizing the students' design thinking, focusing on four specific strategies--generating ideas, conducting…

Using a mixed methods approach, we explore a relationship between students' graph reasoning and graph selection via a fully online assessment. Our population includes 673 students enrolled in college algebra, an introductory undergraduate mathematics course, across four U.S. postsecondary institutions. The assessment is accessible on computers,…

As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included…

Pre-service teachers' metacognitive and problem-solving skills are highly important in the process of becoming effective teachers for providing their students with guided learning support. Determination of these two higher-order thinking processes and skills and investigation of the relationship between them is very important for enabling…

Debugging is essential for identifying and rectifying errors in programming, yet time constraints and students' trivialization of errors often hinder progress. This study examines differences in debugging challenges and strategies among students with varying computational thinking (CT) competencies using weekly coding journals from an online…

Past research indicates that the testing effect is an effective tool to improve memory and retention and academic performance, however, very few studies have investigated the effects across academic disciplines with a focus on higher- vs. lower-level learning. Therefore, in the current study, we sought to examine whether the testing effect occurs…

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes,…

Creative thinking transforms existing information, either from long-term memory or external sources, into new representations and innovative ideas. Creative thinking is an activity that processes received information to produce new representations and innovative ideas. Developing this skill is essential for students; however, recent research has…

Unsuccessful replication attempts of paradigms assessing children's implicit tracking of false beliefs have instigated the debate on whether or not children have an implicit understanding of false beliefs before the age of four. A novel multi-trial anticipatory looking false belief paradigm yielded evidence of implicit false belief reasoning in 3-…

The Dual Process Theory of Autism proposes that autistic individuals demonstrate greater deliberative (slower) processing alongside reduced (faster) intuitive processing. This study manipulated the reasoning time available to investigate the extent to which deliberative and intuitive processing are sensitive to time context in autism. A total of…