While computational chemistry continues to play a growing role in chemical research, issues with access and the timing of when these tools are introduced to chemistry students remain as barriers to wider interest and use. The accessibility of free software for chemical modeling has increased in recent years, promoting the inclusion of…

A significant goal when teaching at the secondary education level is to present the generality of the procedures that are being used to describe a wide range of different physical phenomena. However, this approach is abandoned by physics instructors in many cases since the general mathematical background needed to present the above generality is…

Two bodies initially at different temperatures gathered into an isolated container exchange heat and reach an equilibrium state with a common final temperature. During the process, the system is out of equilibrium and its intermediate temperature is not well defined. By conceiving a quasi-static process with infinitesimal steps from the initial to…

Assessing publication bias is a critical procedure in meta-analyses for rating the synthesized overall evidence. Because statistical tests for publication bias are usually not powerful and only give "P" values that inform either the presence or absence of the bias, examining the asymmetry of funnel plots has been popular to investigate…

Quadratic modeling problems are commonplace in high school mathematics courses; they typically situate quadratic patterns of change and their corresponding parabolic graph within real-world contexts. Traditional approaches to this type of problem lend themselves to making connections across different representations (e.g., Garofalo and Trinter…

The year 2020 saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that not only had wide-reaching social and economic consequences but also put healthcare systems under stress. Strategies for coping with the virus depended heavily on the interpretation of data. This article uses information from a UK upper tier local authority to examine how closely the…

An economy that grows is good. Growth in income is certainly good. In general, growth is seen as a good thing. A global pandemic challenges this notion. Let's be careful of what we wish for- especially if growth is "exponential." This article describes exponential growth and doubling time, and shows how these concepts can be related to…

The visual method in this paper solves linear inequalities in one variable by considering them initially as two competing linear expressions, each of which is then expressed as a linear equation. When the solution of these two linear equations exist, it is viewed as a highlighted area or a line. These linear equations convey the intended visual…

Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data and the explicit or implicit causal conclusions are sometimes misstated. The link between the causal…

Our everyday lives have been transformed in 2020. Key features of this transformation have been the significance of COVID-related numeracy in our everyday lives and the realisation of the story it might tell about lives, health and death. In recent years, governments and educators around the world have been advocating for numeracy as an essential…

The fields of quantitative and covariational reasoning boast a wide range of powerful theoretical tools, which are described carefully in the literature. Less frequent and explicit attention, however, has been paid to writing down detailed, practical guidance for operationalizing these theoretical constructs. Some guidance is provided by…

Helping students reach a clear understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between changes in parameter and the graph of an equation is the focus of the activity outlined in this article. The behavior of phase shifts has been regarded as counterintuitive for many people, and often, because of this, conflict between student intuition and…

Data rules schools and ignorance is far from bliss. From assessment results to questioning educational claims, there is a growing need to understand the numbers used in education. Education data blogger and teacher Richard Selfridge (aka Jack Marwood) unravels the complexities of dealing with educational data and explains statistics in an…

Since the initial recognition that human knowledge is structured in a relational manner, technologies have been developed for assessing and analyzing the "structure" of knowledge for a variety of purposes. A computer-based text analytic offline software system, "ALA-Reader," that was developed to assess this knowledge structure…

This paper focuses on the emergence of abstraction through the use of a new kind of motion detector--WiiGraph--with 11-year-old children. In the selected episodes, the children used this motion detector to create three simultaneous graphs of position vs. time: two graphs for the motion of each hand and a third one corresponding to their…