This paper describes three exemplars of practice inspired by emerging evidence that student-staff partnerships have the potential to significantly enhance many areas of higher education. Students and academics at the University of Adelaide have successfully implemented this collaborative approach across a range of learning and teaching contexts.…

Suppose that there is an inexhaustible supply of $3 and $5 vouchers from the local supermarket. They may only be exchanged for items that cost an exact number of dollars made up from any combination of the vouchers. What is the highest amount not able to be obtained? This is an interesting problem in mathematical thinking and logic requiring only…

Clock Buddies is our favorite first-day-of-class activity. It starts as a nonthreatening icebreaker activity that helps students learn one another's names, but it soon asks students to find their own strategies for solving a real-world scheduling problem. Even highly math phobic students work with others and succeed. Students gain insight from…

A good understanding of ternary phase diagrams is required to advance and/or to reproduce experimental research in solid-state and materials chemistry. The aim of this paper is to describe the solutions to problems that appear when studying or determining ternary phase diagrams. A brief description of the principal features shown in phase diagrams…

Students need lifelong skills to build their problem-solving capabilities for better understanding of the world and themselves. Working through design lessons allows them to directly apply thinking strategies and learning about facts, figures, and concepts while they are crafting meaningful ideas about the influence and social implications of…

Integrating foresight into corporations has proved to be challenging. This account of practice reports on the introduction of futures and foresight (FF) teaching content into an executive Masters programme. The FF content was further linked to and provided a background for action learning sets. The purpose was to identify how introducing distant…

Problem solving is at the heart of mathematics, and is known to support learning for a diverse range of children. However, challenges can be encountered when teaching mathematics through problem solving. This article provides insights from research literature into: (1) the nature of the challenges; and (2) some ways that problem solving can be…

Quantitative Reasoning for Professionals is a two-semester general education sequence that teaches basic and intermediate algebra through the lens of quantitative reasoning. In this course sequence, we emphasize communication and inference-making while teaching practical algebra skills for students in programs such as business, nursing, and social…

Creating a culturally responsive (Ladson-Billings 1995) or culturally sustaining (Paris 2012) learning environment requires teachers making connections to students' experiences outside of school, allowing them to draw on what González, Moll, and Amanti (2006) refer to as students' "funds of knowledge," or the values, interests, and…

Playing games holds an important role in learning and development. While designing and using digital game-based learning (DGML) environments becomes more appealing to educators, there is a disconnect between the goals that educators try to achieve and the design strategies they utilize to achieve their goals. The inclusion of game elements alone…

This paper describes an inquiry-based integrated laboratory project for green synthesis, characterization, and applications of silver and gold nanoparticles. In this project, students were able to choose their choice of plant extract as reducing and stabilizing agents, and the students also designed their own experiments. This course gave the…

This article introduces the concept of adaptive intelligence--the intelligence one needs to adapt to current problems and anticipate future problems of real-world environments--and discusses its implications for education. Adaptive intelligence involves not only promoting one's own ability to survive and thrive, but also that of others in one's…

The purpose of this article is to describe a couple of challenging mathematical problems that involve paper folding. These problem solving tasks can be used to foster geometric and algebraic thinking among students. The context of paper folding makes some of the abstract mathematical ideas involved relatively concrete. When implemented…

This collaborative inquiry between an academic (James Russo) and two school-based practitioners (Jessie McCosh and Travis Hewish) explores student attitudes towards learning mathematics through problem solving in a medium sized primary school in regional Victoria.

In this set of tips, parents and caregivers will learn how to: (1) support children's understanding of fractions at home with activities on dividing objects (recommended for grades K-5); (2) support children's understanding of fractions at home with measurement activities (recommended for grades K-4); (3) support children's understanding of…