This study develops virtual manipulative, polyominoes kits for junior high school students to explore polyominoes. The current work conducts a non-equivalent group pretest-post-test quasi-experimental design to compare the performance difference between using physical manipulatives and virtual manipulatives in finding the number of polyominoes.…

Closing educational gaps between sub-populations in Israel, particularly between students in Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking schools, persists to be one of the priorities of Israel's education system. In the field of information and communication technology (ICT), this goal refers to infrastructure as well as practice, i.e. teaching and…

Second Information Technology in Education Study (SITES) 2006 was an international study about pedagogical practices and the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in math and science classrooms. One of the findings of SITES 2006 was that--across educational systems--a proportion of the math and science teachers in the 22 countries…

Gender differences in the pursuit of technology careers are a current issue of concern. We report on two studies that use surveys, drawings and interviews to examine sixth- and eighth-grade students' perceptions of knowledgeable computer users and their self-perception as a computer-type person. In Study 1, participants were asked to generate…

Learning support studies involving simulation-based scientific discovery learning have tended to adopt an ad hoc strategies-oriented approach in which the support strategies are typically pre-specified according to learners' difficulties in particular activities. This article proposes a more integrated approach, a triple scheme for learning…