This case study demonstrates the ability of high school chemistry students, with varying levels of math preparation, to experience learning-gains on state and district assessments as it relates to chemical reactions, thermodynamics, and kinetics. These advances were predicated on the use of a teaching style rooted in abstract reasoning. The…

Checklists that focus attention on key variables might allow clinicians to find and fix their mistakes. However, whether this approach can be applied to clinicians of varying degrees of expertise is unclear. Novice and expert clinicians vary in their predominant reasoning processes and in the types of errors they commit. We studied 44 clinicians…

We present a multiple-choice test, the Montana State University Formal Reasoning Test (FORT), to assess college students' scientific reasoning ability. The test defines scientific reasoning to be equivalent to formal operational reasoning. It contains 20 questions divided evenly among five types of problems: control of variables, hypothesis…

Students' explanations of their mathematical thinking and conclusions have become a greater part of the assessment landscape in recent years. With a sample of 71 fourth-grade students at risk for mathematics learning disabilities, we investigated the relation between student accuracy in comparing the magnitude of fractions and the quality of…

The aim of this study is to develop a self-efficacy measuring tool that can predict the computational thinking skill that is seen as one of the 21st century's skills. According to literature review, an item pool was established and expert opinion was consulted for the created item pool. The study group of this study consists of 319 students…

This study aims at analyzing how Pythagoras' theorem is handled in three versions of Taiwanese textbooks using a conceptual framework of a constructive-empirical perspective on abstraction, which comprises three key attributes: the generality of the object, the connectivity of the subject and the functionality of diagrams as the focused semiotic…

According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by "asserting" the content as new information; or (b) by "presupposing" the content as given information which would then have to be "accommodated." This…

The present study explores reasoning and argumentation in Greek mathematics and physics texts in specific topics related to the notion of periodicity. In our study, argumentation is taken as the sequence of the modes of reasoning (MsoR) that an author develops in a text when organizing and presenting new knowledge. Inductive content analysis was…

This study examines expressions of reasoning by some higher achieving 11 to 18 year-old English students responding to a survey consisting of function tasks developed in collaboration with their teachers. We report on 70 students, 10 from each of English years 7-13. Iterative and comparative analysis identified capabilities and difficulties of…

This paper describes an emerging approach to the design of task sequences and the theory that undergirds it. The approach aims at promoting particular mathematical concepts, understood as the result of reflective abstraction. Central to this approach is the identification of available student activities from which students can abstract the…

Knowledge of technology is an educational goal of science education. A primary way of increasing technology literacy in a society is to develop students' conception of technology starting from their elementary school years. However, there is a lack of research on student recognition of and reasoning about technology and technological artifacts. In…

This paper proposes "grounded feedback" as a way to provide implicit verification when students are working with a novel representation. In grounded feedback, students' responses are in the target, to-be-learned representation, and those responses are reflected in a more-accessible linked representation that is intrinsic to the domain.…

The "no-excuses" model of education has become one of the most prominent educational alternatives for urban youth. Recently, notable no-excuses charter schools have begun a concerted effort to develop students' character strengths, striving to increase their chances of future success. In this article, we situate the no-excuses approach…

Research suggests that physicians perform multiple reasoning tasks beyond diagnosis during patient review. However, these remain largely theoretical. The purpose of this study was to explore reasoning tasks in clinical practice during patient admission review. The authors used a constant comparative approach--an iterative and inductive process of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how associationism mistakenly assumes that direct experience is possible; that is, there is expectation-free observation and association without prior expectation. Thus, associationism assumes that learning involves the absorption of information from the environment itself. However, contrary…