New media, new knowledge practices, and concepts point to the need for greater understanding of cognitive processes underlying knowledge acquisition and generation in open informational worlds. The authors of the articles in this special issue address cognitive and instructional challenges surrounding multiple document comprehension--a…

Based on a three-year-long ethnography of the hobby of model rocketry, I present a practice-centered theory of interest relationships--that is, the pattern of long-term, self-motivated engagement in open-ended practices that has been theorized under the concept of "individual interests". In contrast to extant theories of individual interests, in…

In this article, the author wishes to emphasize two fundamental points related to theory that were significantly underplayed in Simon et al.'s "A Developing Approach to Studying Students' Learning through Their Mathematical Activity" (2010). The author believes these points are central to any study of children's mathematical learning. The first…

This article describes the development of the Precalculus Concept Assessment (PCA) instrument, a 25-item multiple-choice exam. The reasoning abilities and understandings central to precalculus and foundational for beginning calculus were identified and characterized in a series of research studies and are articulated in the PCA Taxonomy. These…

Son and Goldstone (2009) provided orienting activities intended to increase personal engagement, and these activities reduced participants' transfer based on concepts of signal detectability theory. I offer a theoretical interpretation that differs from theirs. First, instead of assuming that activity is contextualized in some conditions and not…

There are many meanings of "scientific reasoning" or "scientific inquiry" in use, and many corresponding orientations toward its enhancement and tracking. Deciding what these terms mean once and for all is an elusive and likely chimerical goal. However, setting down some core models might help in being clear on where different researchers stand…

Chi (2005) proposed that students experience difficulty in learning about physics concepts such as light, heat, or electric current because they attribute to these concepts an inappropriate ontological status of material substances rather than the more veridical status of emergent processes. Conceptual change could thus be facilitated by training…

Biological phenomena can be investigated at multiple levels, from the molecular to the cellular to the organismic to the ecological. In typical biology instruction, these levels have been segregated. Yet, it is by examining the connections between such levels that many phenomena in biology, and complex systems in general, are best explained. We…

A group of high school students created a drawing of a circle using a device called the Drawing Machine. To describe their experiences, we propose an alternative to the idea that to master a tool one must create a mental version of the tool. We suggest, instead, that as students change their relationships to a tool over time, their lived-in spaces…