A perpetual dilemma of schooling is how to help students develop skills needed for everyday life, including the work world. Quantitative literacy, also called numeracy, involves an ability to apply essential mathematics skills to authentic or near-authentic tasks. Carefully planned classroom activities can help students develop these important…

This article outlines the Idea Factory exercise, an interactive exercise designed to help participants examine group, individual, and organizational factors that affect intergroup conflict. Specific emphasis is placed on exploring the relationship between intra- and intergroup dynamics and identifying managerial practices that foster effective…

Student attitudes can have a positive or negative effect on learning. According to Duschl, Schweingruber, and Shouse, "[students'] goals for science learning, their beliefs about their ability to do science, and the value they assign to science learning are likely to influence their cognitive engagement in science tasks" (2007, p. 195). Therefore,…

Even when two-digit numbers are irrelevant to the task at hand, adults process them. Do children process numbers automatically, and if so, what kind of information is activated? In a novel dot-number Stroop task, children (Grades 1-5) and adults were shown two different two-digit numbers made up of dots. Participants were asked to select the…

This article discusses how the ESL program at an ethnically/linguistically diverse community college (between San Diego and the Mexican border) moved from a general, grammar-based ESL curriculum to a content-based instruction (CBI) curriculum. The move was designed to better prepare 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrant students for freshman…

A lot has been said about what to teach in ICT in primary and secondary education. There are serious discussions even debates about it. Much less has been said about why ICT should be taught. [1] Competences are related actions and tasks done by people (somebody is competent in a certain field if they are able to solve common tasks related to that…

Instructional design models have been criticized for being too inflexible and taking too long to follow to be useful in today's fast-paced environment. As a result, some have rejected instructional design. This article offers an alternative view of instructional design as flexible and able to be accomplished in much shorter time periods than…

Mental rotation performance has been found to produce one of the largest sex differences in cognition accompanied by sex differences in functional cerebral asymmetry. Although sex differences in mental rotation performance can be reliably demonstrated as early as age 5 years old, that is, long before puberty, no data exist as to whether…

A small commercial building in a nearby industrial park has decided to install a rooftop garden for its employees to enjoy. The garden will be about 100 feet long and 75 feet wide. This article presents a design challenge for technology and engineering students wherein they will assist in the initial conceptual design of the rooftop garden. The…

The iGeneration is radically different from any previous generation of students and a variety of existing technologies can be used to engage and excite them in the learning process. The iGeneration is a creative, multimedia generation. They think of the world as a canvas to paint with words, sights, sounds, video, music, web pages, and anything…

Einstein et al. (2005) predicted no cost to an ongoing task when a prospective memory task met certain criteria. Smith, Hunt, McVay, and McConnell (2007) used prospective memory tasks that met these criteria and found a cost to the ongoing task, contrary to Einstein et al.'s prediction. Einstein and McDaniel (2010) correctly noted that there are…

Student affairs is a relatively new profession and has changed in significant ways in response to new developments in higher education, innovations in practice, new conceptual paradigms, and changing economic and political conditions. As a result there is much debate about the core mission and purpose of student affairs and whether it is possible…

As research has suggested, success with homework tasks directly relates to overall academic achievement (Coutts, 2004). In addition, homework provides a venue for developing organizational skills that become necessary as students learn to self-manage. Thus, the importance of developing homework strategies that support both student achievement and…

Bilinguals are slower when naming a picture in their second language than when naming it in their first language. Although the phenomenon has been frequently replicated, it is not known what causes the delay in the second language. In this article we discuss at what processing stages a delay might arise according to current models of bilingual…

Organization of electronic resources workflow is critical in the increasingly complicated and complex world of library management. A simple organizational tool that can be readily applied to electronic resources management (ERM) is the use of checklists. Based on the principles discussed in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, the…