A one-degree angle would certainly be difficult to draw accurately, especially without the aid of other tools like a protractor. However, mentally making a one-degree angle in visualized imagination is not only possible, but it is important for students' emergent understandings of angular measure. When students begin learning about length,…

Synesthesia is a neurological disorder that has to do with the "union of the senses." The literature reveals that students with synesthesia are affected with various degrees of severity. Students may hear a bell ring. Their brain is wired to take that sound and interpret it differently, through color, texture, taste, sound or temperature among…

In school, at least in the US, we were taught to multiply by hand according to a standard algorithm. Most people find that algorithm difficult to use, and many children fail to learn it. We propose a new way to make sense of this difficulty: to treat explicit computation as perceptually supported physical and mental action. Based on recent work in…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of…

Responding to a survey requires cognitive abilities similar to those for any other linguistic task. We argue that, when faced with a cognitively challenging task, individuals respond by simplifying the task, declining it, or performing it poorly. Using the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA 2003) data sets, we document that…

To investigate students' self-monitoring practice and effects of educational level and task importance on self-monitoring, 510 students, varying in educational level from elementary through graduate school, reported the self-monitoring strategies they employed in three learning situations with different levels of task importance. The study…

This brief document offers ten principles of effective school design. They are: (1) Clear Focus and High Expectations for staff and students are defining features of an effective school; (2) A Rigorous Instructional Program provides equitable opportunities to learn and enables every student to master challenging content, skills, and learning…