Advances in the biological sciences necessitate the training of chemical engineers to translate these fundamental discoveries into applications that will benefit society. Accordingly, Tulane University revised its core chemical engineering curriculum in 2005 to include a new introductory course in bioengineering and biotechnology for sophomores.…

This article describes a teacher and class as they discover that their reading comprehension strategies cross over into mathematical problem solving. The students practice using visualization techniques to improve their understanding of word problems. (Contains 5 figures.)

The Magic Mathworks Travelling Circus is a touring maths lab--in and of itself, a good thing. When children enter it, they find particular pieces of apparatus captioned with particular challenges--which is perhaps not such a good thing. Students are faced with an apparatus that can do only one thing, and so are not encouraged to look again at…

One of the main problems in undergraduate research in pure mathematics is that of determining a problem that is, at once, interesting to and capable of solution by a student who has completed only the calculus sequence. It is also desirable that the problem should present something new, since novelty and originality greatly increase the enthusiasm…

As universities strive to create an inclusive environment and ensure a fair and pleasant working climate for all individuals, new strategies must be developed for tracking and responding to issues that do not rise to the level of discriminatory action but nonetheless impact the university's commitment to diversity. This article examines Cornell…

One way of helping faculty understand the integral role of writing in their various disciplines is to present disciplines as ways of doing, which links ways of knowing and writing in the disciplines. Ways of doing identified by faculty are used to describe broader generic and disciplinary structures, metagenres, and metadisciplines. The author…

Calibration is a technique that is commonly used in science and engineering research that requires calibrating measurement tools for obtaining more accurate measurements. It is an important technique in various industries. In many situations, calibration is an application of linear regression, and is a good topic to be included when explaining and…

In teaching primary teacher trainees, an awareness of the characteristic features, especially commutativity and associativity of basic operations play an important role. Owing to a deeply set automatism rooted in their primary and secondary education, teacher trainees think that such characteristics of addition are so trivial that they do not need…

This guide for teachers is a companion piece to the meta-analysis from the Center on Instruction, "Mathematics Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities or Difficulty Learning Mathematics: A Synthesis of the Intervention Research". Based on the findings of this report, seven effective instructional practices were identified for teaching…

High schools may still be anchored to 20th century expectations, but what are the critical guideposts for a 21st century high school education? There are many specific skills and competencies that young people will need to succeed, but more than particular skills, they will need the cognitive capacity to educate themselves throughout their entire…

There are diverse ways to construct instructional activities that teachers can use to foster their students' development of mathematical thinking. It is argued that the use of computational tools offers teachers the possibility of designing and exploring mathematical tasks from distinct perspectives that might lead their students to the…

Vavoso and Apanay discuss revitalizing the Workshop Cycle for the purpose of creating the intellectual environment necessary in teaching for mathematical understanding, which lies at the intersection of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Process and Content Standards. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and a bibliography.)

The new program of study for KS3 and the proposed changes in Y11 assessment for 2012 are now demanding teachers to focus again on the processes of learning. Teachers are being told they must "allow students to select the mathematics to use", "allow students to explore connected problems" and encourage them to work with real…

This paper addresses issues of using computer technology to support in-classroom teaching and learning regarding one of the most frequent problems in such scenarios: the students' attention. First, it presents the distraction and focus of attention problems that arise while using computer technology with off-the-shelf software for supporting…

This study reports the impact of high sensitivity to early exchange in 11th-grade, CSCL triads solving well- and ill-structured problems in Newtonian Kinematics. A mixed-method analysis of the evolution of participation inequity (PI) in group discussions suggested that participation levels tended to get locked-in relatively early on in the…