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1. Circular Reasoning: Shifting epistemological frames across mathematics and coding activities

   Brady, C; Vogelstein, L; Gresalfi, M; Knolle, M (October 2021, North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Olanoff, D; Johnson, K; Spitzer, M (Ed.)

   STEM integration holds significant promise for supporting students in making connections among ideas and ways of thinking that might otherwise remain “siloed.” Nevertheless, activities that integrate disciplines can present challenges to learners. In particular, they can require students to shift epistemological framing, demands that can be overlooked by designers and facilitators. We analyze how students in an 8th grade mathematics classroom reasoned about circles, across math and coding activities. One student showed evidence of shifting fluently between different frames as facilitators had expected. The dramatic change in his contributions gauge the demands of the activities, as do the contributions of other students, who appeared to work within different frames. Our findings have relevance for the design and facilitation of integrated STEM learning environments to support students in navigating such frame-shifts. 

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2. Using interpretive frames to inform selections of artifacts of student thinking

   LaRochelle, R.; Lamb, L.; & Nickerson, S. (January 2018, Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   An important decision that professional development (PD) facilitators must make when preparing for activities with teachers is to select an appropriate tool for the intended learning goals of the PD (Sztajn, Borko, & Smith, 2017). One important and prevalent tool is artifacts of student thinking (e.g. Jacobs & Philipp, 2004). In this paper we add to the literature on artifact selection for professional development by discussing the affordances and constraints of different written artifacts of student thinking. Through a professional noticing assessment, we examine the interpretive frames (Sherin & Russ, 2014) that were invoked by 72 secondary teachers regarding 6 students’ written strategies to proportional reasoning tasks. We characterize different ways teachers might make sense of different artifacts of student thinking, and discuss for what purposes PD facilitators might select particular written solutions. 

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3. Practice with feedback versus lecture: Consequences for learning, efficiency, and motivation.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000205  

   Asher, Michael W; Sana, Faria; Koedinger, Kenneth R; Carvalho, Paulo F (January 2025, Journal of applied research in memory and cognition)

   Many college students drop STEM majors after struggling in gateway courses, in part because these courses place large demands on students9 time. In three online experiments with two different lessons (measures of central tendency and multiple regression), we identified a promising approach to increase the efficiency of STEM instruction. When we removed lectures and taught participants exclusively with practice and feedback, they learned at least 15% faster. However, our research also showed that this instructional strategy has the potential to undermine interest in course content for less-confident students, who may be discouraged when challenged to solve problems without upfront instruction and learn from their mistakes. If researchers and educators can develop engaging and efficacy-building activities that replace lectures, STEM courses could become better learning environments. 

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4. Lines of Infrastructuring: Revealing and Tracing Educators’ Infrastructuring Practices Across Design Implementations

   https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2024.181091  

   Hayden, Ronni; Roque, Ricarose (June 2024, International Society of the Learning Sciences)

   Facilitators in informal spaces play an integral role in creating equitable and engaging STEM rich learning environments for youth. However, the complexity of facilitator’s practices is often undertheorized. Infrastructuring, or the process of dynamically designing with infrastructures (Karasti, 2014) gives us one lens to start to understand this complexity. Building on Azevedo’s lines of practice theory (2011), we aim to show the value in tracing infrastructuring work overtime in order to understand how facilitators’ preferences and constraints are shaping their practice. In this paper we present two traces, called lines of infrastructuring, that make visible the dynamic infrastructuring work of facilitators as they engage in a research practice partnership developing and implementing computing activities in their spaces. We argue that this analysis provides a new lens for understanding the practices of facilitators, and the realities of embedded infrastructures that can restrain the potential for equitable transformation in this work. 

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5. “More conceptual than actual”: Epistemic metacognition in response to a non‐numerical statics question

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.70035  

   Grundy, Lorena S; Koretsky, Milo D (September 2025, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundMetacognitive processes have been linked to the development of conceptual knowledge in STEM courses, but previous work has centered on the regulatory aspects of metacognition. PurposeWe interrogated the relationship between epistemic metacognition and conceptual knowledge in engineering statics courses across six universities by asking students a difficult concept question with concurrent reflection prompts that elicited their metacognitive thinking. MethodWe used a mixed‐methods design containing an embedded phase followed by an explanatory phase. This design allowed us to both prompt and measure student epistemic metacognition within the learning context. The embedded phase consisted of quantitative and qualitative analyses of student responses. The explanatory phase consisted of an analysis of six instructor interviews. ResultsAnalysis of 267 student responses showed greater variation in students' epistemic metacognition than in their ability to answer correctly. Students used different kinds of epistemic metacognitive resources about the nature and origin of knowledge, epistemological forms, epistemological activities, and stances toward knowledge. These resources generally assembled into one of two frames: aconstructed knowledge framingvaluing conceptual knowledge and sense‐making, and anauthoritative knowledge framingforegrounding numerical, algorithmic problem‐solving. All six instructors interviewed described resources that align with both frames, and none explicitly considered student epistemic metacognition. ConclusionsInstructors' explicit attention to epistemic metacognition can potentially shift students to more productive frames for engineering learning. Findings here also inform two broader issues in STEM instruction: student resistance to active learning, and the direct instruction versus inquiry‐based learning debate. 

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