With the rapid development of artificial intelligence in many disciplines, computational thinking (CT) has become an important skill for the 21st century. To promote vocational high school students' CT skills in learning about programmable logic controllers, this study intended to examine how cognitive and metacognitive prompts separately or…

21st-century skills can be applied to STEM education. The Merdeka Curriculum also has a passion to support teachers and schools in exploring and implementing STEM as a learning approach to improve student competence. The study aims to develop learning tools consisting of the syllabus, lesson plans, and student worksheets (SLS) that are valid and…

Scholars and researchers generally believe that scientific inquiry is an important activity for cultivating students' applied knowledge and high-level thinking ability. The process of scientific inquiry can promote students' learning motivation and trigger their higher-order thinking ability. However, students may not have enough prior knowledge…

The biological community is currently undertaking one its greatest scientific endeavours, that of constructing the Tree of Life, a phylogeny intended to be an evidenced-based, predictive road map of evolutionary relationships among Earth's biota. Unfortunately, we know very little about how such diagrams are understood, interpreted, or used…

In this study, students' understanding of chemical changes was investigated in relation to four individual differences, related to logical thinking, field dependence/independence, convergence and divergence thinking. The study took place in Greece with the participation of students (n = 374) from three grades (8th, 10th and 12th grades) of…

This study uses the Mathematical Tasks Framework (Stein & Smith, 1998) to assess the cognitive demand of mathematical tasks implemented in four mathematics classrooms, and to investigate the role of technology in both low- and high-level cognitive demand tasks. The metaphor of using technology as an amplifier or reorganizer (Pea, 1987) is used…

Genre-based approaches to teaching writing have made important strides in heightening students' awareness of audience and purpose but have paid less attention to the ways in which expectations for written performance in school context are embedded in expectations for certain kinds of discipline-based thinking. In this paper we present a study that…

The aim of this research was to explore Australian high-school students' argumentation and informal reasoning about biotechnology. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Year-8 students (12-13 years old), 14 Year-10 students (14-15 years old) and 6 Year-12 students (16-17 years old) from six metropolitan high schools in Perth,…

One possible approach students can cope with abstract algebra concepts is reducing abstraction. This notion occurs when learners are unable to adopt mental strategies as they deal with abstraction level of a given task. To make these concepts mentally accessible for themselves, learners unconsciously reduce the level of the abstraction of the…

Recently, the significance of learners' informal reasoning on socio-scientific issues has received increasing attention among science educators. To gain deeper insights into this important issue, an integrated analytic framework was developed in this study. With this framework, 71 Grade 10 students' informal reasoning about nuclear energy usage…

The purpose of this case study is to analyse the learning processes of a 16-year-old student as she learns about simple electric circuits in response to an analogy-based teaching sequence. Analogical thinking processes are modelled by a sequence of four steps according to Gentner's structure mapping theory (activate base domain, postulate local…

Discussed are the implications of the three main stages of conceptual change--"awareness, disequilibrium, and reformulating"--on misconceptions of grade 10 students in Israel. The difficulties and problems encountered with the procedure are included. (KR)

This paper addresses components of a 3-year longitudinal study in which 9th and 10th grade students in Australia, Canada, and Zambia participated in data-handling programs through networked learning communities. Of interest here are the students' responses to a selection of "ends-in-view" problems, which formed the major part of the…