This study analyzed the processes used by students when engaged in modeling activities and examined how students' abilities to solve modeling problems changed over time. Two student populations, one experimental and one control group, participated in the study. To examine students' modeling processes, the experimental group participated in an…

This 21st Century Skills Map is the result of hundreds of hours of research, development and feedback from educators and business leaders across the nation. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has issued this map for the core subject of Science.

Previous research (e.g., De Bock, 2002) has shown that--due to the extensive attention paid to proportional reasoning in elementary and secondary mathematics education--many students tend to overrely on proportional methods in diverse domains of mathematics (e.g., geometry, probability). We investigated the development of misapplication of…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM's) Process Standards support teaching that helps students develop independent, effective mathematical thinking. The books in the Heinemann Math Process Standards Series give every middle grades math teacher the opportunity to explore each standard in depth. The series offers friendly,…

The current study investigated the discreet task completion hypothesis presented by C. H. Skinner (2002) by investigating how the rate of interspersing affects performance on and preferences for academic assignments. Specifically, 70 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students were presented with four assignment pairs of multiplication problems.…

P.A.C.E.S. stands for Participation, Appearance, Cleanup, Engineering, and Safety. The author has traditionally used design briefs to set the limits on processes and materials to solve a given problem. The design brief brings out all kinds of "out of the box" thinking, with many correct answers to solve the problem. The P.A.C.E.S. rubric ties the…

In this article, the authors describe their efforts to assess prospective K-8 teachers' knowledge of proportional reasoning. Based upon their analysis of prospective K-8 teachers' work on a mathematics performance task, they discuss the implications for preparing prospective teachers to teach proportional reasoning to their students. In general,…

Using an approach based on a Harvard study that found "when the whole body is involved, the number of brain cells brought to the learning activity doubles," the author offers over one hundred kinesthetic activities for classroom use. Activities are organized by content area, include directions for number of players, objective, and…

Previous studies have shown that even preschoolers can solve inversion problems of the form a + b - b by using the knowledge that addition and subtraction are inverse operations. In this study, a new type of inversion problem of the form d x e [divided by] e was also examined. Grade 6 and 8 students solved inversion problems of both types as well…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between student understanding of the nature of science and their problem-solving strategies. Six hundred and twenty Year 8 students in Taiwan twice completed two conceptual problem-solving tests and a questionnaire on the nature of science. Four of these students were selected for follow-up…

The 1972 publication of the Marland Report by the U.S. Commissioner of Education proposed a multifaceted definition of gifted and talented education, enhancing what traditionally had been a focus on academics. Leadership materialized as a component of giftedness, along with general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or…

Much has been said on matter of aesthetics and mathematics--perhaps most commonly articulated in relation to properties such as "beauty" and "elegance," which are used to distinguish good from not-so-good mathematical products. Despite its importance in the work of mathematicians, it has been argued that aesthetics cannot be incorporated into…

This study examined the structure of middle school students' general epistemological beliefs and domain-specific mathematical problem-solving beliefs by asking whether the 2 belief systems are related and whether they predict students' academic performance. Over 1,200 seventh- and eighth-grade students completed an Epistemological Questionnaire,…

Leadership has been characterized by particular personal qualities and traits, specifically one?s ability to influence others? thoughts, energies, emotions, feelings, or behaviors within the scope of emergent leadership (Farrall & Kronberg, 1996). Based on self organization patterns of groups, a leader emerges while other group members move into…

The conditions under which explicit instruction in checking, combined with worked examples, may be beneficial in learning how to translate sentences into algebraic equations was examined from the perspective of cognitive load theory. In two experiments it was shown that Grade 8 and 9 students were initially disadvantaged by the inclusion of a…