Many technological artifacts (e.g., humanoid robots, computer agents) consist of biologically inspired features of human-like appearance and behaviors that elicit a social response. The strong social components of technology permit people to share information and ideas with these artifacts. As robots cross the boundaries between humans and…

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within "some realm of what is" and a predetermined "sphere of objects". The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has…

Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically…

Simulation and modeling activities, a key point of computational thinking, are currently not being integrated into the science classroom. This paper describes a new visual programming tool entitled the Simulation Creation Toolkit. The Simulation Creation Toolkit is a high level pattern-based phenomenological approach to bringing rapid simulation…

Empirical arguments rely on examples without necessarily addressing all cases. Students should be skeptical of empirical evidence and should seek more secure arguments for generalizations, such as those that explain why a generalization is true for all cases. Generalizing on the basis of patterns in data is an important mathematical practice;…

This article reasserts the centrality of reasoning as the focus for moral education. Attention to moral cognition must be extended to incorporate sociogenetic processes in moral growth. Moral education is not simply growth within the moral domain, but addresses capacities of students to engage in cross-domain coordination. Development beyond…

There is much of value for educationists in the work of the great Russian novelist and thinker, Fyodor Dostoevsky. This paper explores a key theme in Dostoevsky's later writings: the notion of a "Golden Age". It compares the ideal depicted in Dostoevsky's story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" with the implied utopia of the…

The ability to reason about numbers in relative terms is essential for quantitative literacy, which is necessary for studying academic disciplines and for critical citizenship. However, the ability to reason with proportions is known to be difficult to learn and to take a long time to develop. To determine how well higher education applicants can…

The establishment and use of nuclear power plants to meet the energy need is a controversial socioscientific issue in all the countries of the world; as in Turkey. In this regard, the current study intended to investigate the effect of the socioscientific issue-based instructional activities related to the Nuclear Energy Plants (NEP) that have…

This study examines progression trends of Chinese students' scientific reasoning skills across grade levels from elementary school to university. A large-scale survey using the Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (CTSR) was conducted with 2669 Chinese students at 13 grade levels (grades 4-16). The construct validity of the CTSR was first…

Primary objective: This study represents the first large-scale research on high school philosophy in a public education curriculum in North America. Our objective was to identify the impacts of high school philosophy, as well as the challenges of teaching it in its current format in Ontario high schools. Research design: The qualitative research…

Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8- to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the "scientific inquiry cycle" (SIC).…

The UK's 2016 decision to exit the European Union and the discussion surrounding it indicate that public understanding of British identity has important consequences, one way or another. Defining British identity will be an important task in the years to come. The UK government not long ago provided some guidance on the matter of British identity…

In this study, I use a systemic functional linguistics approach to examine mathematics classroom discourse with the aim of providing a plausible explanation of how students could actively participate in productive classroom discussions without adopting ways of reasoning that were accepted in the classroom community. In this way, I work in the…

Researchers taking a domain-general approach to the development of scientific reasoning long thought that the ability to engage in scientific reasoning did not develop until adolescence. However, more recent studies have shown that preschool children already have a basic ability to evaluate evidence and a basic understanding of experimentation.…