Visualisation has been a critical means of scientific reasoning, knowledge development, and communication. In science classrooms, visualisation plays significant roles for teaching and learning. To better understand the landscape of the existing research on visualisation for supporting student science learning in K to 12 classroom contexts, we…

Around 6% of U.K. children are underachieving at school relative to their potential (URP). We explored whether difficulties with phonological decoding, short-term memory (STM), and complex grammar may be responsible. We compared school-based reading test data or formal SATs, and verbal reasoning in 2462 children (150 URP and 2312 non-URP children)…

Analytical questions are the types of questions that can lead students to gain an understanding of a concept and explore reasoning. This research is a descriptive, qualitative study investigating the emergence of analytical questions and their interaction patterns in group discussions facilitated by a scientific approach to learning. The subjects…

This qualitative study focuses on Grade 6 students' possibilities to engage in disciplinary writing practices in history teaching in a school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area. The aim is to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate different literacy expectations in the teaching. The researcher used…

Kant's commitment to autonomy raises difficult questions about the very possibility of Kantian moral education, since appeal to external pedagogical guidance threatens to be in contradiction with autonomous virtue. Furthermore, moral education seems to involve getting good at something through repetition; but Kant seems to eschew the notion of…

The aims of this article are to document the types of signs that young children make to represent their mathematical thinking, and to determine the extent to which features of usage-based language acquisition are evident in children's early graphical communications made in mathematical contexts. Studies of young children's symbolic principles in…

Describing the processes of metaphor comprehension has been a hot topic of discussion among researchers throughout the past four decades. One of the major challenges has been to find a mechanism that can describe the processes involved in the comprehension of various kinds of metaphors. This article suggests that different types of metaphors could…

Individuals draw conclusions about possibilities from assertions that make no explicit reference to them. The model theory postulates that assertions such as disjunctions refer to possibilities. Hence, a disjunction of the sort, "A or B or both," where "A" and "B" are sensible clauses, yields mental models of an…

Many education researchers have advocated grounding abstract mathematical and scientific concepts in students' lived experiences, environmental interactions, and perceptions. This dissertation explores the causal effects of various grounding strategies in instructional settings, specifically on the topic of statistical sampling. The first chapter…

Historical reasoning, as a disciplinary literacy, aims to develop higher-order thinking in addition to depth of historical knowledge beyond the textbook and memorization of facts. It teaches students to use information across multiple sources to contextualize and corroborate historical accounts, constructing an informed yet critical interpretation…

Executive functions (EFs) are an umbrella term that includes various cognitive abilities (such as inhibition, planning, goal-setting, monitoring, and shifting). There is common agreement that there are three main EFs: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Further studies have reported that compared to typically developing…

In this paper, I apply the Multiple Documents Text-Based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction (MD-TRACE) model, to describe the types of cognitive processes that students engage to critically reason about social issues, as they are portrayed through mass media. In addition to examining such processes, I further consider the extent to which…

This qualitative descriptive study aimed to explore how community college students describe their motivations and reasoning when learning about controversial science topics at a southwestern community college. Anti-science attitudes have been increasing globally, but is not fully understood. Two research questions were developed using the theory…

For several decades, there has been a push to advance students' knowledge and abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One capacity that has been linked positively to STEM achievement is relational reasoning, which involves identifying associations between objects, ideas, and situations. Yet, few studies have examined…

The expectation for doctoral research to contribute to knowledge is closely related to examiners' attention to conceptual and theoretical components in the thesis. These components require abstract thinking and familiarity with a number of research ideas that are difficult to teach and learn. We argue that these can be made more accessible to…