This study aims to equip students with conceptual modeling skills to address compelling 21st-century challenges in chemistry and chemical engineering education. System-based concept mapping is a critical competence for analyzing global, often complex, problems. We examined how conceptual modeling could scaffold practical experimental design,…

To understand retention, evaluation of guided pathways implementation is an important tool. In an effort to help students succeed, colleges often give students a specified set of core courses and a specific or even prescribed pathway to complete their general education requirements. Retention efforts are always a topic with administrators at…

This study investigated the effects of lecturing, cooperative learning and concept maps on the development of critical and creative thinking skills. A quasi-experimental non-randomized study involved a class of students from the 3rd year of Psychology and two classes from the 3rd year of Pre-service Elementary Teachers. The study ran for 15 weeks,…

Studies have shown that students learning to write in engineering fields struggle to integrate subject matter and communication expertise, and that STEM faculty's communication knowledge often remains tacit, rather than being explicitly taught to students. Here we show a method for eliciting and revealing tacit communication knowledge using what…

We designed an educational activity for undergraduate students and assessed how this newly-constructed activity promoted students' argumentation skills, thereby fostering their epistemic beliefs. This argumentation-based learning activity involved digital concept mapping. A quasi-experimental design involved pretests and posttests that were…

Network science is an emerging area of complexity science that uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems and could represent a new way of quantifying and investigating the internal structure of domain-specific knowledge as approximated by students' concept maps. Students enrolled in introductory psychology constructed concept maps to…

This study was conducted to investigate concept mapping as an instructional technique to help student designers tackle complex issues in instructional design. Specifically, this study focuses on three dimensions: perceived learning, collaborative learning, and usability. We examined how student designers perceived the use of Cacoo as a concept…

Research has shown that retrieval activities, that is, actively recalling previously studied information, may substantially contribute to learning from complex educational materials, sometimes more so than other more popular techniques such as rereading and elaborative study. In this context, recent studies (Blunt and Karpicke, J Educ Psychol…

One of the main goals of gamification in educational settings is to increase student motivation and engagement. To facilitate the design of gamified educational systems, in recent years, studies have proposed various approaches (e.g., methodologies, frameworks and models). One of the main problems, however, is that most of these approaches are…

Many studies have incorporated concept maps into digital games to enable learners to make connections between subject concepts in the game. However, most learners do not associate spontaneously with the thematic concepts in the game but need to be facilitated by effective scaffolding mechanisms to reconceptualize the learning process and content.…

Purpose: Experiential learning is crucial in education, as it offers hands-on, practical experiences that enable individuals to develop their skills and knowledge more engagingly and interactively. In recent years, experiential learning has become a significant aspect of education. To provide academic scholars with a thorough roadmap for further…

This study investigates the effect of studying with topic maps provided by a self-developed language learning support system on (a) learning perception, (b) learning achievement and (c) variation in learning attitude and motivation, from the perspective of prior learning attitude, motivation and learning style. An analysis was conducted on the…

This study aims to develop, implement, and evaluate an instructional design model to enhance the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of physics student teachers. Model development is accomplished in five stages over two years: 1) problem identification, 2) preliminary identification of the product and design concepts, 3) preliminary theories and…

Background: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, American students have demonstrated substantial losses in achievement (Amplify, 2021; Domingue et al., 2021; Dorn et al., 2020; Storey & Zhang, 2023), while chronic absenteeism doubled after the pandemic, with the largest increase among low-income students (Chang et al., 2022; Dorn et al., 2021). Among…

Teachers are increasingly expected to incorporate Project-based learning (PBL) pedagogy to teach science. While teachers' definitions and challenges in the use of PBL are widely studied, very few studies focus on the development of a teacher's knowledge of the use of PBL over multiple projects. The current research is an in-depth case study aimed…