In the present study we investigate what problems adolescents in year-nine compulsory school face when trying to learn to play a song together, how they take on these, and how their teacher responds to these problems. The studied practice, where students are to form a band and learn to play a song together in music class, is an example of…

Feedback is generally considered a beneficial learning tool, and providing feedback is a recommended instructional practice. However, there are a variety of feedback types with little guidance on how to choose the most effective one. We examined individual differences in working memory capacity as a potential moderator of feedback type. Second-…

Providing instruction on spatial geometry, specifically how to calculate the surface areas of composite solids, challenges many elementary school teachers. Determining the surface areas of composite solids involves complex calculations and advanced spatial concepts. The goals of this study were to build on students' learning processes for…

A study involving 106 fourth graders and two teachers from a school in Beijing investigated the impact of a peer-led, open-format discussion approach, called collaborative reasoning (CR), on students' reading comprehension and teacher's professional learning. Mixed results of effects of CR on children's reading comprehension were found. After…

We report on a design based research study exploring how the organization of classroom activity impacts early elementary students' critical criteria for evaluating representations in science class. The ability to critique representations produced by others as well as one's own is an important practice when working with representations. Effective…

We examined the role child factors on the acquisition and transfer of learning the control of variables strategy (CVS) via instruction or self-discovery. Seventy-six fourth graders and 43 sixth graders were randomly assigned to a group receiving direct CVS instruction or a discovery learning group. Prior to the intervention, cognitive, scientific,…

Students' judgments about "what counts" as mathematics in and out of school have important consequences for problem solving and transfer, yet our understanding of the source and nature of these judgments remains incomplete. Thirty-five sixth grade students participated in a study focused on what activities students judge as…

Direct instruction is a proven effective method to strengthen children's ability to design unconfounded experiments using the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). Recent research suggests that task segmentation can also promote children's use of this strategy. The present study investigated this assumption by comparing the relative…

Creating graphical representations can foster knowledge gains on science topics in elementary school students by promoting active integration and translation of new information. Collaborating on joint representations may encourage children to discuss and elaborate their knowledge. To foster productive interactions, children may greatly benefit…

The mentor's background in educational roles has been presented as a moderator of School-Based Mentoring (SBM). However, the analysis of overlapping mentoring and teaching roles has been underemphasized in the literature. The aim of this study is to test whether the combination of mentoring and teaching roles influences the mentees' school…

Educational research indicates that error reflection, especially reflection on incorrect examples, has a positive effect on knowledge acquisition. The benefit of error reflections might be explained by the extended knowledge of incorrect strategies and concepts (negative knowledge) which fosters the learning of new content. In a field experiment…

Educators often face serious time constraints that impede multiple repetition lessons on the same material. Thus, it would be useful to know when to schedule a single repetition unit to maximize memory performance. Laboratory studies revealed that the length of the retention interval (i.e., the time between the last learning session and the final…

Eighth grade students in Australia (N = 60) participated in an experiment on learning how to solve percentage change problems in a regular classroom in three conditions: unitary, pictorial, and equation approaches. The procedure involved a pre-test, an acquisition phase, and a post-test. The main goal was to test the relative merits of the three…

The current study examines variation in other-regulation, conceptualized as efforts by one student to regulate their group's work. This study extends research which has conceptualized other-regulation as temporarily guiding others' conceptual understanding and skill development by broadening the spectrum of other-regulation to include…

In this study we examined change in students' situational interest as a function of student and task characteristics. Fifth- and sixth-graders (n = 52) were assigned to one of two task conditions that used a different version of a science simulation. The versions differed in how concrete vs. abstract the simulation elements were.…