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In the current educational landscape, the development of critical thinking abilities is becoming increasingly important, especially considering the prevalence of hybrid learning methods. This investigation aimed to evaluate the proficiency of critical thinking skills in students who are immersed in hybrid learning. A descriptive quantitative research approach was employed, utilizing observation, documentation, and critical thinking assessments to collect data from a sample of 60 students from vocational high schools. The findings highlight two main results: firstly, the majority of students demonstrate a low level of critical thinking skills within the hybrid learning context, indicating the need for improvement; secondly, various factors that influence these skills were identified. These outcomes emphasize the challenges associated with acquiring 21st-century skills and emphasize the necessity for collaborative efforts. Both educators and students must enhance their commitment to effective learning preparation, with a particular emphasis on motivation to foster improved critical thinking abilities. This research provides valuable insights for educators and policymakers who are striving to enhance the hybrid learning environment to better cultivate critical thinking skills in students.

Active learning, including student thinking and discussion in class, has been shown to increase student learning gains. However, it is less clear how instructor-level variation in the implementation and timing of active learning activities affects student gains. Our study aims to investigate the extent to which the time spent on individual episodes of active learning activities influences student performance. We hypothesized that instructors who let students spend more time on peer discussion and individual thinking on practice problems associated with particular learning objectives would have better student exam scores on exam questions addressing those objectives. To test this hypothesis, we obtained a large data set of classroom recordings and student exam scores from an introductory biology course at a large 4-year university, where three instructors shared identical teaching materials and exams for different course offerings. Contrary to our hypothesis, although the three instructors spent significantly different amounts of time on episodes of thinking and peer discussion, there was no correlation between the total time spent on active learning activities and student performance on exam questions. Linear mixed-effects modeling of the effect of the length of episodes of student thinking and discussion on exam score found that in the context of shared instructional materials, the amount of course time spent on active learning activities did not reliably predict student performance on associated exam questions. This result held true even when only considering learning objectives with high variations in performance between offerings, difficult exam questions, or exam questions requiring higher-order thinking skills. Although our study was only conducted in one course, our results imply that time spent per individual episode of student thinking or peer discussion may not be the primary factor explaining the positive effects of active learning and that it may be worthwhile to explore other factors.

This research was conducted to see if using ChatGPT prompts students to think more deeply through reflection reports. The case study method and qualitative research methodology were used to carry out this study. Five graduate students in the Curriculum and Instruction department at Aksaray University's Social Sciences Institute who were teachers in various subjects and employed at various state school levels participated in the study. It was found that the majority of participants accepted all of the information presented by ChatGPT based on a citation as true, did not feel the need to control data reliability, and could be manipulated by ChatGPT while doing self-evaluation. Additionally, despite the fact that they prepared reflective reports in which they compared their essays with ChatGPT and included questions that prompted them to think critically and reflectively, as well as the fact that they had taken a graduate-level course on the teaching of higher order thinking skills, it was acknowledged that they could not demonstrate the expected performance in using higher order thinking skills other than to a limited extent. The onus should be on educators to pioneer positive examples of how to utilize ChatGPT and provide direction on how to harness its potential, supported by critical thinking, rather than to avoid using it and identify it as a tool to be avoided.

Designed by the Harvard University Project Zero team, Artful Thinking is basically a program that aims to improve students' awareness of art and increase their critical thinking skills by interpreting works of art and discussing them. In this way, students will acquire twenty-first century skills such as critical thinking and aesthetic understanding. The primary objective of this research was to investigate the impact of the Artful Thinking program on the development of critical thinking skills and attitudes towards art in 6th grade students, by implementing it as action research. This study was conducted in a middle school in Gaziantep, Turkey. 23 students and a Turkish teacher participated in the study. A total of twenty-four works of art (paintings, graffiti and ancient mosaics) were shown to students over eight weeks. Students expressed their opinions about each picture for 10-15 minutes. In order to make the students think in higher-order about art, the teacher asked questions prepared by the researcher. Thus, students were enabled to develop critical and higher order thoughts about the paintings. The findings from the students, teacher, and researcher indicated that the Artful Thinking program had a favorable impact on the students' perceptions of art, and that the students' cognitive abilities and capacity for articulation were enhanced by this program.

The ubiquity and ease with which microbial cells disperse over space is a key concept in microbiology, especially in microbial ecology. The phenomenon prompted Baas Becking's famous "everything is everywhere" statement that now acts as the null hypothesis in studies that test the dispersal limitation of microbial taxa. Despite covering the content in lectures, exam performance indicated that the concepts of dispersal and biogeography challenged undergraduate students in an upper-level Microbial Ecology course. Therefore, we iteratively designed a hands-on classroom activity to supplement the lecture content and reinforce fundamental microbial dispersal and biogeography concepts while also building quantitative reasoning and teamwork skills. In a class period soon after the lecture, the students formed three-to-five-person teams to engage in the activity, which included a hands-on dispersal simulation and worksheet to guide discussion. The simulation involved stepwise neutral immigration or emigration and then environmental selection on a random community of microbial taxa represented by craft poms. The students recorded the results at each step as microbial community data. A field guide was provided to identify the taxonomy based on the pom phenotype and a reference to each taxon's preferred environmental niches. The worksheet guided a reflection of student observations during the simulation. It also sharpened quantitative thinking by prompting the students to summarize and visualize their and other teams' microbial community data and then to compare the observed community distributions to the idealized expectation given only selection without dispersal. We found that the activity improved student performance on exam questions and general student satisfaction and comfort with the biogeography concepts. Activity instructions and a list of needed materials are included for instructors to reproduce for their classrooms.

This research is focused on assessing how the incorporation of Padlet technology affects the evaluation of historical thinking skills in high school history education. The research methodology involved a pretest-posttest approach with a randomly selected group of 70 students. The research tool employed questionnaires aligned with the study's objectives. Data analysis utilized comparative statistics, specifically the paired sample t-test. The outcomes of the study reveal a significant positive impact resulting from the integration of Padlet technology in assessing historical thinking skills. This is substantiated by the sign value being less than 0.05 for all aspects examined. Consequently, this research provides compelling evidence that this approach can serve as an effective alternative for improving the quality of history education at the high school level. The findings of this study have important implications for educators, learners, and other stakeholders. These results may be used by educators to create more successful teaching strategies that will improve their students' historical thinking and comprehension. As a personal learning tool, Padlet technology can help students comprehend the historical subjects they are studying better. For those involved, this study offers compelling proof that using Padlet technology in high school history curricula may improve its caliber.

For students to be able to compete and overcome challenges in the future, critical thinking is essential. The study's descriptive methodology aims to describe the students' critical thinking abilities. Every high school in a South Sulawesi district made up the research population. Based on school accreditation, with the use of a proportionate stratified random sampling technique, 150 students were chosen to comprise the research sample. The test instrument used is an essay distributed online. The indicators for the description questions are interpretation, analysis, and interpretation thinking skills. According to the study's findings, students' critical thinking abilities in static fluid material have an average score in the medium category of 73.09. In terms of school accreditation, students' physics critical thinking abilities average 73.87 for schools with A accreditation, 72.43 for schools with B accreditation, and 68.47 for schools with C accreditation. The percentage of each indicator of critical thinking skills is 34.58 in inference, 33.70 in analysis, and 31.71 in interpretation. It is anticipated that this study will give a broad picture of students' critical thinking competencies for teachers to choose and implement the most suitable stimulus to aid students in developing their critical thinking abilities.

The capacity for mathematical reasoning, pivotal in grasping core math concepts, directly shapes a student's success in their mathematical studies. This study aimed to detail and analyzed how the search, solve, create, and share (SSCS) instructional framework impacts mathematical reasoning skills within the context of linear equations. We adopted a quasi-experimental research approach using a non-matching control group design. To gather data on mathematical reasoning proficiency, a validated and reliable essay-type test was employed. Data collection on mathematical reasoning abilities used an essay test instrument that has been valid and is reliable. This research involved 102 eighth grade students whereby they were selected by using a purposive sampling. To measure and describe the effect size, we utilized a specific method, yielding a result of 0.97. The t-test was employed to assess the influence of the SSCS learning model, and the significance value obtained was less than 0.05. The effect size, as determined, stands at 0.97, suggesting a substantial impact. The t-test results underscore a significant relationship between the SSCS learning model and the enhancement of mathematical reasoning abilities. This research delineates a framework for employing the SSCS model to enhance students' mathematical reasoning capabilities. It is evident that such reasoning abilities play a pivotal.

The aim of this study is to examine how middle school mathematics teachers diagnose and attempt to eliminate students' misconceptions in algebra. The study employed a case study method and embedded single-case design. The research was conducted with three mathematics teachers working in different state schools and having different professional experiences, as well as ten students from the eighth-grade classes of the same schools. The data collection instruments used in the study included the Diagnostic Test developed by researchers to identify students with misconceptions, the Assessment Framework prepared for the evaluation of teacher performances in diagnosing and eliminating student misconceptions, and Semi-Structured Interviews conducted between students and teachers, which were recorded and made available in audio/video format. The study revealed that teachers generally resorted to conventional methods in the process of diagnosing and eliminating students' misconceptions. In most cases, teachers superficially addressed students' errors and did not fully focus on students' thinking. Regarding the processes aimed at eliminating student misconceptions, teachers preferred to directly inform students that their answers were incorrect, rather than facilitating students in recognizing their own mistakes. The findings highlight the need to increase teachers' awareness and student knowledge regarding misconceptions in algebra.

The article reviews some of the relationships between AI and education, emphasizing the metaphors used, the difficulties in finding points of agreement, as well as aspects of the social criticism that is made of AI (e.g. considering that it can be a form of unwanted deviation). AI appears as one more case of technology that comes to improve education, as happened in the past with other less "intelligent" technologies, although now with more arguments in its favor. Secondly, it explores the logical mechanisms (abduction) that are widely used in human reasoning but also in AI, showing how their uncontrolled use can lead to certain conversation algorithms being able to lie, something that teachers would not do. An ethical rather than logical question is raised that deserves to be explored later.

Culture shapes pupils' mathematical learning, their performances and life trajectories of participation (César, 2013a, 2013b). It also contributes to the senses they attribute to mathematical learning (Bakhtin, 1929/1981). Using collaborative work and interempowerment mechanisms facilitates knowledge appropriation (César, 2009). This is particularly important for pupils participating in minority cultures, socially undervalued and whose L1 is not the instruction language. Bi-univocal culture mediation (César, 2017b) is important regarding empowerment. We used an instrument to evaluate pupils' abilities and competencies (IACC), conceived by the "Interaction and Knowlwdge" (IK) team (Machado, 2014), and other mathematical tasks. The goal we address is to trace the differences between their approaches to problems, mathematical reasoning and solving strategies used by pupils whose L1 is ideographic (Creole, Cape Verde) or phonetic (Portuguese). We developed an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995). The main participants are the pupils from almost 600 classes (all over Portugal and Cape Verde) who participated in the IK. The analysis of some examples illustrates that L1 shapes pupils' approaches to problems, mathematical reasoning and solving strategies. This evidence plays an important role in their access to school achievement and in teachers' understanding about how they can promote pupils' mathematical learning.

This article describes a conceptual and empirical approach for estimating a human capital production function of child development that incorporates mother- or child-fixed effects. The use of mother- or child-fixed effects is common in this applied economics literature, but its application is often inconsistent with human capital theory. We outline the problem and demonstrate its empirical importance with an analysis of the effect of Head Start and preschool on child and adult outcomes. The empirical specification we develop has broad implications for a variety of applied microeconomic analyses beyond our specific application. Results of our analysis indicate that attending Head Start or preschool had no economically or statistically significant effect on child or adult outcomes.

Research Findings: Outdoor environments have recently become part of the early childhood quality puzzle, which has long been important to trace relationships between children's experiences in child care and their development. However, fewer studies have analyzed the extent to which the quality of these outdoor spaces relates to young children's social and cognitive outcomes. This study analyzed data collected from a randomized sample of 92 licensed child care programs and 405 preschool children located across North Carolina, United States. Multilevel analyses showed that outdoor environment quality was associated with children's abstraction and flexible thinking skills above and beyond global levels of classroom quality. Correlation analyses revealed that in outdoor environments with more natural elements, children displayed fewer behavior problems. Practice or Policy: Outdoor quality measures need to be more widely tested in relation to child outcomes. The influence of child care outdoor environment quality on children's development should to be more deeply understood through longitudinal designs and ecological theories of human development, which allow conceptualizing developmental change over time as a function of interactions between individuals and context.

Effective learning in chemistry education requires students to understand visual representations across multiple conceptual levels. Essential to this process are visuospatial skills which enable students to interpret and manipulate these representations effectively. These abilities allow students to construct mental models that support problem solving and decision making, improving their understanding of complex concepts, for example chemical structures and reactions. The impact of individual differences in mental imagery, such as aphantasia and hyperphantasia, on chemistry students' spatial thinking when engaging with visual representations is not well understood. This paper presents two exploratory studies that examine how the vividness of mental imagery is related to student outcomes in chemistry-related visuospatial problem solving. The first study quantitatively assessed the performance of first-year university students in tasks requiring complex visual and spatial reasoning within a chemistry context. The second study, involving the same participants, used qualitative interview data to investigate their cognitive strategies with a focus on how their mental imagery impacts their problem-solving approaches. Preliminary results suggest that the vividness of students' visual mental imagery did not significantly impact their ability to spatially reason with visual representations in chemistry. Our findings also indicate that students with aphantasia may employ alternative strategies that mitigate their lack of visual mental imagery. This paper highlights the need for further research into the diversity of cognitive mechanisms employed by chemistry students of varying mental imagery capabilities.

To win in sports competitions, in addition to excellent sports skills, coping strategies in the face of various competition situations are also critical for success. Therefore, cultivating students' diverse, creative and flexible tactical application abilities is an important educational goal in sports training. However, in the online component of blended training in sports, conventional instructional approaches are teacher-centred and hardly ever adopt the consolidated approaches to creative problem solving used in other fields. This results in limited opportunities for students to discover the problems and apply their creative thinking tendencies for problem solving. Hence, the present study proposed applying a consolidated creative problem-solving approach in the online phase of blended training initiatives in order to cultivate students' higher-order thinking skills. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, a convenience grouping-based quasi-experiment design was adopted. A 10-week teaching experiment was conducted in a billiards training course. A total of 79 students were recruited in this study; they were divided into one CPS-BL group with 41 students and one conventional blended learning (C-BL) group with 38 students. The results showed that the CPS-BL approach could significantly enhance students' billiards striking strategies, creative thinking tendencies and problem-solving skills.

Tangible programming tools have become a mainstream teaching aid in gamification programming learning (GPL) due to their interactivity and ability to enhance novice learners' computational thinking and spatial reasoning skills. However, comparing the relative efficacy of different programming tools that simultaneously support these skills was not adequately explored. This study designed and evaluated three programming tools: the tangible programming tool (TPG), which uses real touchable objects; the block programming tool (BPG), which employs virtual programming blocks and 3D game scenarios; and the paper-and-pencil programming tool (PPG), which uses paper and pen to draw. The study involved 112 seventh-grade students from three natural classes: Class A (TPG, n[subscript 1]=37), Class B (BPG, n[subscript 2]=38), and Class C (PPG, n[subscript 3]=37). These students completed four gamification programming tasks and CT skills, spatial reasoning skills, enjoyment, cognitive load and GPL task list measurements. The results indicated that the tangible programming tool led to lower cognitive load, significant improvement in spatial reasoning skills and better abstraction and problem decomposition skills. The block programming tool provided a more enjoyable experience and facilitated students' algorithm design and efficiency. The paper-and-pencil programming tool was found to be less effective in improving spatial reasoning skills. This study's findings can help programming educators cultivate students' thinking skills and improve their learning experience by effectively selecting the most appropriate programming tools.

The ability to reason with representations is pivotal for successful learning in Organic Chemistry and is closely linked to representational competence. Given the visual nature of this discipline, this comprises competency in extracting and processing relevant visual information. With regard to the resonance concept, proficiency in identifying whether electron delocalization applies in a molecule is an essential prerequisite to using this concept in problem-solving. However, prior research shows that students struggle to recognize whether molecules profit from electron delocalization, and seldom use this concept in problem-solving. As it remains unclear how the variation of structural features affects students' consideration of resonance, this quantitative study seeks to identify characteristics regarding students' perception of electron delocalization. To this end, undergraduate students enrolled in an Organic Chemistry I course (N = 699) completed an online survey in which they had to decide on resonance stabilization for molecular structures with varying structural features. K-means cluster analysis was performed to explore patterns in students' proficiency in discerning resonance stabilization and how they relate to other performance variables (e.g., time-on-task). The results suggest pattern recognition approaches with students' attention being guided by singular structural features or structures' visual similarity to familiar patterns (i.e., allylic carbocations), with less attention to implicit features.

Solving organic chemistry reactions requires reasoning with multiple concepts and data (i.e., multivariate reasoning). However, studies have reported that organic chemistry students typically demonstrate univariate reasoning. Case comparisons, where students compare two or more tasks, have been reported to support students' multivariate reasoning. Using a case-comparison task, we explored students' multivariate reasoning. Our study was guided by the resources framework. One conceptual resource activates another conceptual resource and, successively, a set of conceptual resources. This successively activated set of resources is expressed in a line of reasoning. Pairing this framework with qualitative methods, we interviewed eleven second-semester organic chemistry students while they compared two substitution reaction mechanisms and chose the mechanism with the lower activation energy. We analysed what conceptual resources and lines of reasoning were activated and the variation to which students engaged in multivariate reasoning. Students activated multiple conceptual resources and, moreover, extended their activated resources into both developed and undeveloped lines of reasoning. When constructing their explanations, most students engaged in univariate reasoning. These students provided a developed line of reasoning selected from multiple activated resources, or they provided an undeveloped line of reasoning constructed from only one activated resource. Few students engaged in multivariate reasoning. These students provided both developed and undeveloped lines of reasoning from multiple activated resources. Our findings highlight the variation with which students engage in both univariate and multivariate reasoning. Therefore, we recommend that case-comparison activities scaffold engagement with multiple lines of reasoning in addition to activating and developing them.

The current study aims to contribute to the literature on how organic chemistry students weigh various factors when predicting products of substitution and elimination reactions. This study focuses specifically on these mechanism types, as they are often the first instances where students must consider the "how" and the "why" of how reactions occur. Previous literature highlights that such reasoning can be challenging. To better support our students, it is essential to understand how they conceptualize these mechanisms. Here, we present results from an investigation into how students compare bimolecular and unimolecular substitution and elimination reactions (S[subscript N]1, S[subscript N]2, E1, E2). Students completed tasks involving case comparisons and "predict-the-product" exercises. Through the analysis of nine semi-structured interviews using coordination class theory, we found that (1) students placed a greater emphasis on the importance of the starting substrate in the outcome of a reaction, and (2) focused less on the function of the nucleophile or base in each reaction. Using coordination class theory, we identified visual features and knowledge elements that students coordinated, allowing us to create "resource graphs" that represented students' conceptualizations. These graphs helped visualize the trajectories of students' predictions by illustrating how they balanced multiple factors. We discuss implications for supporting students in distinguishing among reaction mechanisms.

The current study examined whether children with and without ADHD differed in text processing when contradictory information was present. Forty-seven children between 10 and 14 years old performed a self-paced reading task. Half the passages contained contradictory information. Additionally, language and cognitive skills were assessed to examine the relationships between text processing and individual differences in these abilities (working memory, oral sentence recognition, verbal and non-verbal intelligence, word reading fluency and decoding ability). Results indicate that the non-ADHD group modulated their reading behaviour based on the presence of inconsistent information, whereas the ADHD group did so in response to the consistent information. However, this task effect in the ADHD group was primarily observed with children who scored low on background measures (e.g., verbal intelligence, working memory). Additionally, the children with ADHD recalled fewer units of information than their non-ADHD peers. Correlations demonstrated that the pattern of relationships between the text comprehension measures (i.e., true-false test and text recall) and the background measures differed between the two groups, such that measures were more closely associated with each other in the ADHD group. Results are discussed in terms of educational implications to support children with ADHD who experience reading comprehension difficulties.

It is known that teacher noticing skills improve through different interventions such as video clubs, lesson study, and short-term professional development programs. However, it is not known whether this improvement is permanent and whether teachers can transfer their noticing skills into the classroom. It is extremely important to provide an enduring change in teacher noticing skills. Rather than short-term programs, implementing long-running professional development programs, which last almost 2 years, enables teachers to maintain their noticing skills. At this point, the current study aims to develop in-service middle school mathematics teachers' professional noticing of students' mathematical thinking on pattern generalization during their involvement in a 2-year online professional development program enriched with collaborative discussion. Accordingly, the study was built on the professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking framework, including three noticing skills: attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond. Participants comprised 31 in-service middle school mathematics teachers with up to 15 years of professional experience working in public schools in seven different provinces of Türkiye. The teachers participated in the online PDP, including scenarios involving student strategies of particular mathematics content. The analysis of the data gathered from the pre-test and post-test let us conclude that the three noticing skills of the in-service middle school teachers exhibited incredible progress through their involvement in collaborative discussion in a long-running online PDP. Based on this result, the characteristics of the online PDP are put forth to develop teachers' noticing skills.

Creativity and problem-solving are 21st-century skills that we need to develop in our students. Research on computational thinking (CT) integration in school subjects and STEAM activities has shown a positive effect on students' problem-solving skills and creativity. Our study extends our previous work from the integration of CT in a mathematics lesson into a STEAM lesson to develop students' creativity. Our Math + CT activities have been developed through educational design research (EDR), and now we have added the context of arts (Batik), science (beeswax and coloring), and engineering (3D modeling and printing). Online learning was conducted with pre-service teachers and high school students. We facilitated digital fabrication by asking students and pre-service teachers to create their Batik stamp pattern from 2D to 3D to be printed. Data were collected from participants' GeoGebra and 3D files they had created. We analyzed the data descriptively and presented participants' creations. The result showed that students could extend their limited coding and programming knowledge to create the Batik patterns. Moreover, within a limited time, the artwork they designed significantly differs from the initial figure introduced to them. We also presented the realistic 3D-printed Batik stamp and how it worked and our limitations.

This paper reflects the results from a 3-year quantitative study in higher education on inquiry-based learning (IBL). Utilizing primary data collection in a quasi-experimental survey, we examined the impact of IBL on six cohorts of undergraduate students. We aimed to answer our main research question: Can IBL be an effective pedagogy that helps students develop their key skills, through: (1) exploring how students assessed themselves and their peers on four skills; and (2) comparing student and peer assessments across social work courses utilizing IBL as pedagogy utilizing a social work course taught with traditional methods (non-IBL), and a nonsocial-work course using IBL. We analyzed the quantitative data applying bivariate analysis (paired and independent t-tests) with SPSS. We found that in social work and nonsocial-work courses using IBL as pedagogy, students and their peers identified an increase in the development of their key skills; peer-assessments were consistently higher than self-assessments. Our study reveals that IBL may offer an opportunity to provide authentic learning activities and assessments in social work education to support students' development of four key skills required for success in higher education.

Language in CLIL is dependent on the subject that embraces it, as it is the case of Physical Education. The present descriptive exploratory case study examines how content and language are integrated into Physical Education lessons with CLIL in secondary education. It applies the Cognitive Discourse Function construct as a heuristic to analyse 19 lessons. The results show that all the acts of thinking are used, but not equally. The specific unit and the approach used by the teacher seem to affect the prevalence of each category and the students' engagement when verbalising their acts of thinking. In addition, a number of features (i.e., the role of questions, simple language, explicit language teaching, multimodality, translanguaging) were identified in order to integrate content, language and literacy. These findings can thus inform researchers, teachers and teacher training programmes to understand how integration takes place and promotes deep learning.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the presence of systems thinking after an educational proposal on climate sustainability based on reflection and video creation. To evaluate this competency, an evaluation rubric was constructed. Design/methodology/approach: This research is a case study with a mixed approach. It was carried out with 82 future teachers of Primary Education, making content analysis of the videos made. For the design of the rubric, a specific review of the literature was conducted. Findings: The results showed that trainee teachers can identify, relate and understand interconnected processes, but have difficulties in thinking temporally or in understanding the hidden dimensions of the system. The results reveal how the development of systems thinking in the Climate Change framework is a complex learning process. The rubric created allowed us to systematize the evaluation by making it possible to assess the subskills involved. Originality/value: To improve the development of systemic thinking, using real data linked to the consequences of this problem and ICT applications that foster an approximation to future realities is suggested. In addition, conscious and fair decision-making should be promoted on the basis of a transformative education that favors this thinking in interaction with other key competences in sustainability. The innovative rubric allows the evaluation of systemic thinking skills for the study of climate change, conceptualized from the interrelationships of the natural, social and economic dimensions and from its implications for life, on different geographical and temporal levels.

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a design thinking teaching and learning model on students' design thinking skills in science class. The study utilised two projects, 'Making a Simple Solar Water Heater' and 'Drawing a 3D Topographic Map of Zhejiang Province,' based on the 5th-grade science curriculum in China, and involved 45 Grade-5 students from a primary school. The quasi-experimental repeated measure method was used to evaluate the students' improvement in design thinking skills, with task-based pre-, mid-, and post-tests. Employing quantitative data analysis, the results showed significant improvement in students' overall performance, with more pronounced improvement between the pre-test and post-test than between the pre-test and mid-test. The analysis of the seven design indexes of students' design work demonstrated significant improvement in five indicators, except for 'material' and 'shape.' The study highlights the importance of incorporating design thinking into elementary school curricula to equip students with the necessary competencies for success in the twenty-first-century workforce.

Critical thinking is embedded in national university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies' statements on higher education. At the same time, there are tensions surrounding critical thinking in higher education, such as its commodification, Eurocentrism, and relationship to rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler's writings on human originary technicity, this paper argues that critical thinking takes different forms according to technical and cultural milieus. For Stiegler, human originary technicity makes prosthesis the human condition: we are biological and technical, both organic and inorganic matter. Reasoning, reflection, and evaluation are relative to the technologies of memory that form everyday and intellectual culture. Stiegler's analysis articulates how digitalisation threatens and protects reasoning and reflection, enabling the demonstration of how critical thinking takes specific forms in digitalised societies. The paper proposes "prosthetic critical thinking" as a practice that can embrace differing understandings of critical thinking, namely as skills and dispositions associated with reasoning and as the practice of critical pedagogy. The resulting understanding of critical thinking shows it to be a plural, inclusive, and contingent practice relevant to higher education.

The purpose of this article is to present the results of an exploratory analysis of the level of perceived achievement of the complex thinking competency in a group of engineering students in their last semester at a university in Western Mexico. Its intention is to identify whether this population has the necessary skills to be able to meet challenges and solve problems related to the demands of their future professional environments. Specifically, it seeks to identify their level in the meta-competency of creative or innovative thinking, considering it a valuable skill for Industry 4.0. Methodologically, a descriptive statistical analysis focused on arithmetic means, standard deviations, boxplot, principal components and biplot has been performed. In conclusion, and from the results, it is possible to appreciate that sufficient data were found to confirm that the participants show a high level of perception of creative thinking performance, making them more suitable to the contemporary challenges that Industry 4.0 implies for their professions.

Part of learning science is practicing reasoning, but some of the most common approaches to science instruction offer students little opportunity to do that, especially in the whole-class setting of large-enrollment courses. We present and closely examine a single episode of instructor listening--an instructor deliberately adopting a stance, and establishing a classroom culture, in which students' nascent efforts at disciplinary reasoning are elicited, made sense of, and integrated into the collective learning process--in a 140-student introductory chemistry class, as an exemplar of what such instruction can look like. We delineate five aspects of the focal episode that mark it as exemplary of a listening approach to instruction. And we consider concerns about and potential value of such an approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant challenges for practical teaching within the sciences. While many instructors adopted innovative alternatives to conventional practicals, many relied on digital approaches that did not give students hands-on experience. In this study we evaluate the use of 'at home' practical kits used in first year physics and biology teaching at a UK university as an alternative to laboratory classes. In particular we focus on the enforced independence over time, space and help-seeking inherent in the at-home model as a driver of student learning and confidence. Students reported the kits encouraged independence, problem solving and self-reliance. Students associated the at-home practical kits with higher level cognitive skills as defined by Bloom's revised taxonomy. While most students enjoyed using the kits, those who did not enjoy them tended to have higher previous experience of practical work before university. Students saw potential value in the kits after the pandemic, so could be an alternative or supplement to in-person practicals. We recommend that practical organisers use our findings around the development of student self-reliance to reconsider practical design and incorporate more opportunities for students to solve problems independently to increase effectiveness of practical teaching.

Understanding experimental design (e.g. control of variable strategy or CVS) is foundational for scientific reasoning. Previous research has demonstrated that demonstrations with cognitive conflict (e.g. asking students to evaluate and explain different experimental designs) are effective in promoting children's scientific reasoning, however, the implementation of this approach often requires significant instructional time and resources. This study reports the impact of a brief, scalable intervention on one component of scientific reasoning, understanding experimental design, by providing brief instruction on the control-of-variable strategy (CVS), embedded in a food science activity (popping popcorn). Three-hundred and seven (307) 3rd-5th graders in the midwestern US participated in either a CVS intervention or a demonstration on the science of popcorn without a CVS intervention. Performance on a pre-activity test (involving identification of good and bad experiments) did not differ between conditions. By contrast, post-activity performance was significantly greater for classes who received the CVS intervention. Thus, a brief discussion of the CVS embedded within a food-science demonstration can have a meaningful impact on children's understanding of conducting a quality experiment. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of a simple, low-cost intervention for CVS that is potentially scalable.

When learning about scientific phenomena, students are expected to "mechanistically" explain how underlying interactions produce the observable phenomenon and "conceptually" connect the observed phenomenon to canonical scientific knowledge. This paper investigates how the integration of the complementary processes of designing and refining computational models using real-world data can support students in developing mechanistic and canonically accurate explanations of diffusion. Specifically, we examine two types of shifts in how students explain diffusion as they create and refine computational models using real-world data: a shift towards mechanistic reasoning and a shift from noncanonical to canonical explanations. We present descriptive statistics for the whole class as well as three student work examples to illustrate these two shifts as 6th grade students engage in an 8-day unit on the diffusion of ink in hot and cold water. Our findings show that (1) students develop mechanistic explanations as they build agent-based models, (2) students' mechanistic reasoning can co-exist with noncanonical explanations, and (3) students shift their thinking toward canonical explanations after comparing their models against data. These findings could inform the design of modeling tools that support learners in both expressing a diverse range of mechanistic explanations of scientific phenomena and aligning those explanations with canonical science.

Many articles have been published in gifted education in recent years. This study aims to provide a comprehensive review of the evolution of academic studies in gifted education. In this context, the structural topic modeling (STM) method was used to analyze the topics and trends in the field. STM is a machine learning technique that utilizes natural language processing techniques based on text mining. It is a valuable methodology for identifying a text corpus's main topics and trends. The corpus used in this study is 5,127 articles from nine leading journals in giftedness without any year limitations. As a result of the analysis, five topics that prominently emerged in the literature were discovered. These are curriculum and instruction, social-emotional characteristics, thinking skills, identification and assessment tools, and equity and policies. The research topics and trends discovered due to the analysis are discussed within the literature framework, and recommendations are presented.

Extant literature has preliminarily confirmed the potential benefits of holographic projections for educational purposes. Yet, students' experiences of learning by holographic projection have rarely been addressed. The main purpose of this study was therefore to explore students' conceptions of and approaches to learning by holographic projection. A holographic projection system was devised to assist students in learning the concept of lunar phases. This study also investigated the relationships between students' conceptions and approaches, and determined if there were any variations based on students' learning gains. Phenomenographic analysis was adopted to analyze 30 university students from Taiwan, and a multiple-choice conceptual test was conducted to assess their learning achievements. The main findings indicated that students with conceptions of learning by holographic projection as increasing the presence of a scene or mapping 2D images to 3D structures tended to adopt surface approaches, such as only observing the changes presented in the holographic projection, repetitively operating the system functions without intended purposes, or simply following the instruction guidelines to meet the minimal requirements. However, this study unexpectedly found that students who utilized surface approaches had significantly higher learning gains on the conceptual test than their counterparts did.

The core purpose of integrating inquiry-based learning strategies into STEM activities is to create a challenging learning environment that stimulates students' active learning, thereby effectively enhancing their interest in learning, thinking skills, and practical application abilities. To achieve these goals, developing more technology-assisted tools and platforms to improve teaching efficiency and enrich the learning experience becomes crucial. Therefore, this research developed InquiryGPT, which guides students through the POEE inquiry process by imposing limitations, facilitating dialogue, and providing feedback, while avoiding over-reliance on ChatGPT. This promotes the cultivation of higher-order thinking skills through interactions with InquiryGPT, thereby enhancing students' knowledge construction and understanding. This study, based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), examined the effectiveness of InquiryGPT. The results showed no significant difference between InquiryGPT and ChatGPT in terms of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Additionally, through analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), the study further analyzed the impact of InquiryGPT on students' higher-order thinking skills and learning scores, proving that it significantly enhances students' creativity, problem-solving abilities, critical thinking, and knowledge construction.

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 undergraduate CT course. Participants used Scratch, a block-based programming language, and their journals from five assignments were analyzed using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and Structural Topic Modeling. High-performing students engaged with diverse topics and specific blocks tied to their weekly projects while low-performing students faced repetitive and broad challenges, such as understanding motion blocks and broadcast concepts. These patterns reveal that low-performing students struggle particularly during the 'diagnose the fault' phase of debugging, often hindering their progress in the final stage. Such challenges highlight the necessity for targeted educational interventions to improve the debugging proficiency and overall CT skills. The study underscores the importance of further research into students' logical thinking processes during code review and debugging, suggesting the use of think-aloud protocols and detailed tracking of debugging practices for deeper insights. This research contributes to the field by showing that differentiated instruction and strategic support can enhance debugging skills across different student performance levels.

This study examined the effects of embodied learning experiences on students' understanding of computational thinking (CT) concepts and their ability to solve CT problems. In a mixed-reality learning environment, students mapped CT concepts, such as sequencing and loops, onto their bodily movements. These movements were later applied to robot programming tasks, where students used the same CT concepts in a different modality. By explicitly connecting embodied actions with programming tasks, the intervention aimed to enhance students' comprehension and transfer of CT skills. Forty-four first- and second-grade students participated in the study. The results showed significant improvements in students' CT competency and positive attitudes toward CT. Additionally, an analysis of robot programming performance identified common errors and revealed how students employed embodied strategies to overcome challenges. The effects of embodied learning and the impact of embodied learning strategies were discussed.

Although student covariation reasoning has been explored in depth to improve understanding of the correspondence between variables, research has focused on studying existing reasoning about variables in Cartesian representations. The working method had a qualitative approach, with a descriptive exploratory scope, the spontaneous representations that the participants evidenced under the level of covariational reasoning of the variables present in three contextualized situations were explored, posed to a population of third-grade middle school students. The students argued with concrete and abstract drawings the general behavior of the variables. At low levels of reasoning they used pictorial representations, at higher levels they used graphical diagrams and tables. The exploratory study shows a relationship between the type of spontaneous representations and the student's level of covariational reasoning, as well as the rigor of the description of the problem.

Mathematical reasoning has been a critical concern in Turkey especially since the structure of the student selection examination for high schools changed six years ago. The ability to solve the questions in the new exam requires high level reasoning and argumentation skills. Schools, whether they are public or private, prepare 8th graders for this exam with intense educational programs. They frequently use skill-based questions--similar questions to the ones in the new exam, which require high level mathematical reasoning. This study indicates that students gain better mathematical reasoning skills in learning environments promoting collective discussion and argumentation. Hence, these questions need to be solved in these kinds of environments. In this study, two cases are analyzed to understand the argumentation process in classrooms in depth. Audiotapes of two 8 th grade classrooms, one from a public school, another from a private school, are analyzed. The same teaching material--a worksheet including skill-based questions--is used in the classrooms. During analyzing, qualified argumentation pattern--a pattern including students' claims and justifications/evaluations for those claims--is defined. Analysis of classroom audiotapes revealed that that there are significant differences between two classrooms' argumentation structure and type of dialogues emerged in the classroom. In one classroom there is a more qualified argumentation process than in the other classroom. In addition, analysis of the type of the dialogues indicates that two classrooms have different types of dialogues. Overall, the study reveals that despite the differences, both classrooms mostly included teacher-individual interactions and they have little collective discussion.

Within the field of K-2 computer science (CS) education, unplugged computational thinking (CT) activities have been suggested as beneficial for younger students and shown to impact young students' skills and motivation to learn about CS. This study sought to examine how children demonstrate CT competencies in unplugged sequencing tasks and how children use manipulatives to solve unplugged sequencing tasks. This case study approach examined two unplugged sequencing tasks for six children ranging from ages five to eight (pre-kindergarten to 2nd grade). Children showed evidence of several CT competencies during the sequencing tasks: (1) pattern recognition, (2) algorithms and procedures, (3) problem decomposition, and (4) debugging. The strategies and use of manipulatives to showcase CT competencies seemed to evolve in complexity based on age and developmental levels. Taking into account children's abilities to demonstrate CT competencies, this study suggests that sequencing is a developmentally appropriate entry point for young children to begin engaging in other CT competencies. In addition, these unplugged sequencing tasks can also be easily integrated into other activities commonly experienced in early childhood classrooms.

This study investigates the contribution of plugged and un-plugged activities to primary school students' development of computational thinking skills. The plugged and unplugged activities were used together in this study. In the implementation, in addition to the un-plugged activities prepared by the "Ministry of National Education," activities prepared by the researcher were also used. Plugged activities were also determined and implemented on the code.org website according to the age of the students and subjects. A quasi-experimental design was used with a single group to determine the changes before and after learning and to investigate the research questions. The measurements were performed with the Bebras tasks both before and after the implementation. Bebras consists of internationally valid tasks that measure computational thinking. The results showed that the combination of plugged and unplugged activities helped improve students' computational thinking skills. Our findings show that using a combination of unplugged and plugged activities is beneficial for primary school students. Further research is needed to evaluate these activities separately and their role in providing gains. Additionally, the effects of using different teaching methods in programming education can be examined. [Note: The issue number (2) shown in the citation on the PDF is incorrect. The correct issue number is 3.]

This study aims to describe preservice mathematics teacher knowledge of higher order thinking skills in terms of definition, Bloom's taxonomy level, curriculum, learning, and evaluation. This research is quantitative research with a survey method. and sample consisted of 248 preservice mathematics teachers in semesters VI-VIII of the Department of Mathematics Education, Nusa Cendana University, Timor University, and Wira Wacana Sumba University. The instrument used was a questionnaire about high order thinking skill (HOTS) which consisted of 105 statements. Data analysis used Likert's summeted rating, one sample test, Mann Whitney, Kruskall-Wallis tests, multiple linear regression test, and multivariate analyisis of variance (MANOVA) test. The results showed that the knowledge level of preservice mathematics teacher was in the good category. Based on gender differences, there was no significant difference in the average knowledge of preservice mathematics teacherabout HOTS, there was a significant difference in the average knowledge of preservice mathematics teacher about HOTS which is significant based on differences in academic ability and gender differences do not significantly affect knowledge about HOTS levels in Bloom's taxonomy, curriculum, and pedagogy while academic knowledge has a significant effect on HOTS knowledge of preservice teachers in almost all aspects except for pedagogy.

The objective of this research is to examine teachers' competence in designing activities after engaging in professional development activities aimed at enhancing teaching design in order to develop students' thinking abilities that are contextually appropriate. The participants consist of 5 elementary school science teachers from schools. The research employed semi-structured interviews and classroom observation as research instruments. The findings reveal that teachers engaged in self-development through observation and learning from their peers within the community of practice (CoP). They receive advice and feedback from fellow teachers and apply these insights to improve their activities. Consequently, teachers are able to continuously refine and develop their teaching approaches to align with students' contexts. This approach facilitate diversification in thinking and learning management, as well as collaborative teamwork to enhance teaching methods. As a result, engaging and interesting thinking development activities are incorporated into student learning, along with the creation of a seamless learning-promoting environment. Collaborative teamwork in instructional design and problem-solving further afford teachers the opportunity for additional self-learning and personal development. This collaborative approach also contributes to fostering cognitive diversity and relieved the need for individual teachers to undertake all tasks independently.

Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) are an important element in facing the challenges of the 21 st-century. Difficulty in solving problems systematically, facing challenges in an organized manner, and being unable to design original solutions are due to the low HOTS that students have. HOTS ability can improve students who low-level thinking skills in several ways, for example, through learning integrated with media, practice, and assessment or HOTS-based cognitive assessment. The purpose of this study was to develop and implement a HOTS-based cognitive assessment to assess students' HOTS abilities. The device development model used is an adaptation of the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (ADDIE) model. The research sample consisted of 30 students in class 11 of the Governance and Office Automation Competency Program of Vocational High School 1 Kudus. The result is that 11 students have the HOTS ability with very good criteria, 17 well criteria, and 2 enough criteria. This study suggests that a test instrument for further research is to measure students' HOTS ability. The Experts conclude that HOTS-based cognitive assessment can be used as an approach to improve students' HOTS to actively think selectively and supported by logical argumentation.

Socioscientific issues (SSIs), which are an important component of scientific literacy in science education, are scientific-based issues with dilemmas and no clear answers. SSIs can be local issues that affect a region or global issues that affect the world. This study aimed to investigate informal reasoning (IR) patterns and their influencing factors on science teachers about local SSIs. The research was designed as a case study. The participants consisted of 38 science teachers from various provinces of Central Anatolia, where the local features of context were at the forefront. Teachers were asked to form an IR about the texts with dilemmas addressed to them. Using content analysis, teachers' IR patterns were based on rationalistic, emotive, and intuitive reasoning; factors affecting their reasoning were analyzed according to sociology-culture, environment, economy, science, technology, ethics-morality, and policy (SEE-STEP). In the results, science teachers mostly use rationalistic IR and rationalistic and intuitive IR patterns about energy-related local SSIs. While the factors that most influence teachers' IR regarding local SSIs are economy and environment, the factor that least influences their IR is ethics. As a result of the study, IR is closely related to the context and environmental/socio-cultural background that can influence IR. Based on the result that teachers' IR is affected by the content, the main suggestion of this study is to investigate the IR of different contents in local SSIs.

Flavell's theory of metacognition was innovative at the time for its promising practicality. However, research findings that report inconsistencies in metacognitive trainings' outcomes and insufficiencies of translating the theory into mainstream classrooms have accumulated since then. In this sense, there may be a need to revisit metacognition theory for its practicality and credentiality. From a phenomenological perspective, this paper first describes the fundamental tenant of theory; thinking, and whether metacognition theory recognizes the nature of thinking. To manage thinking, it should be stimulated first. In other words, a sensitivity towards a stimulus that is metacognitive responsiveness needs to be raised to initiate the attendance of higher order thinking. Thinking and metacognitive responsiveness pertain to personal relevance, attentiveness, interest, previous experiences, tools for thinking, features of tasks, and the nature of social interactions. Therefore, it is important to present the stimulus designed or adapted to initiate individuals' thinking or metacognitive responsiveness. In this paper, Flavell's theory of metacognition was revised to embrace metacognitive responsiveness explicitly, and it is highlighted that practical implications need to focus on materials to initiate metacognitive responsiveness.

This analysis dissects a piece of information into its parts and determines how they interact in constructing a concept. This study focuses on enhancing the analytical thinking skills of grade 6 students in science and technology courses by implementing inquiry-based learning management. The aim is to meet the minimum requirement of 70 percent and assess student satisfaction with the approach. This work follows a classroom action research approach involving planning, action, observation, and reflection steps. The target group comprises 25 grade 6 students studying in the first semester of the 2022 academic year at an elementary school in Northeast Thailand, selected through purposive sampling. The research tools include six 5E inquiry-based learning plans, an analytical thinking skills test, and a satisfaction questionnaire. Data collection involves implementing the learning plan in two operational cycles, conducting analytical thinking tests, and administering satisfaction questionnaires. The collected data are analyzed to determine achievement levels and satisfaction ratings. The statistics used are mean, standard deviation, and percentage. The findings from the first operational cycle indicate that 76.0% of students did not meet the evaluation criteria. After the second operational cycle, the mean score improved, and all students met the assessment criteria of 70.0%. Overall, the inquiry based learning approach has the potential to enhance analytical thinking skills, and student satisfaction levels were generally positive. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating effective learning management strategies, such as analytical thinking, to improve students' higher-order thinking skills.

The ability to think creatively is the ability to generate new ideas, innovative solutions, and unconventional thoughts in response to a situation or problem. Creative thinking involves many aspects, including imagination, association of ideas, mental flexibility, and views that are different from the usual. Creative thinking needs to be grown in students because creative thinking is very important in learning which will greatly assist students in solving problems with various solutions. The use of appropriate learning model equipment can support the development of students' critical thinking skills. One effort that can be done is to use innovative teaching materials that combine various activities to develop students' creative thinking abilities. The purpose of this study is to describe the process of developing STEM-based teaching materials with a problem-based learning model on three-dimensional material, namely distance. This study uses the development method or the Research and Development method, namely 4D (define, design, develop, disseminate) but is limited to the develop stage. The data analysis technique of this research uses descriptive analysis techniques both qualitatively and quantitatively. Data collection uses a feasibility validation sheet, readability and student response questionnaires. The results showed that the average score of the eligibility of teaching materials was 81.66% in the appropriate category, the average score of readability of teaching materials was 90% in the easyto-understand category, and the average student response score to teaching materials was 99% with very good criteria. Thus, from this assessment it can be concluded that the teaching materials developed are feasible to use, easy to understand, and have a good response from students. The suggestions put forward are that other teachers/researchers are expected to be able to carry out the same research but develop teaching materials with different materials or abilities.