In the age of the internet, it is increasingly difficult to write homework assignments in a way that encourages students to struggle with a problem on their own without seeking answers from other sources. This is especially true in lower-level courses, where students often start with the attitude of "I can't do this." In this article, I…

The development of expertise in chemical information literacy requires practicing these skills in the context of chemistry work. The integration of information literacy in problem-based learning is an instructional strategy that can be used to situate skill development in the chemistry classroom. This work describes a mixed-methods approach to…

One way that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) initiatives are being utilized is to encourage schools and teachers to integrate key science-based concepts into daily instruction. The reason is simple: it is more than just an instructional improvement or curricular enhancement; it is a research-based strategy that addresses the…

The transition towards a sustainable economy has given a new term "green competences". Green competences build upon the foundation of core competences including literacy, numeracy, communication, teamwork and problem-solving - which along with awareness of environmental issues and entrepreneurship, facilitate lifelong learning and…

Teachers readily welcome instructional materials that situate mathematics in the real world because they provide the relevance of mathematics to students who genuinely seek the answer to the question, "When are we ever going to use math in real life?" Although using the real world as a motivational hook is often effective for engagement,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an urgent need for engaging computational alternatives to traditional laboratory exercises. Here we introduce a customizable and flexible workflow, designed with the SARS CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 in mind, as a means of reinforcing fundamental biology concepts using bioinformatics approaches. This workflow…

Teaching a hands- and minds-on course, in which feedback is essential in order to learn, is difficult, especially in times of COVID-19 where student progression cannot be monitored directly. During the lockdown period, the workshops of an undergraduate Design Engineering course had to be transferred to the home situation, which required a redesign…

Diagnostic labels for children with primary, or otherwise unexplained, language disorders range across settings and within the scientific literature. Among other problems, this lack of agreement creates difficulty with the successful employment of evidence-based practice. This article reviews the evolving terminology and addresses issues of…

Tripp Reade is the school librarian at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. This article describes how he redesigned his school's library orientation program after learning about escape rooms and a variant known as puzzle rooms. Puzzle rooms present players with a set of challenges to solve; they require "teamwork,…

Knowing an equation has a unique solution is important from both a modelling and theoretical point of view. For over 70 years, the approach to learning and teaching "well posedness" of initial value problems (IVPs) for second- and higher-order ordinary differential equations has involved transforming the problem and its analysis to a…

The sheet resistance of a conducting material of uniform thickness is analogous to the resistivity of a solid material and provides a measure of electrical resistance. In 1958, L. J. van der Pauw found an effective method for computing sheet resistance that requires taking two electrical measurements from four points on the edge of a simply…

This article explores the process of finding the Fermat point for a triangle ABC in three dimensions. Three examples are presented in detail using geometrical methods. A delightfully simple general method is then presented that requires only the comparison of coordinates of the vertices A, B and C.

Members of a third-grade class were involved in a heated discussion. They were using a fixed number of links to create fences for toy cows. The children could change the shape of the field produced by the links, but they could not add any links or take any away. Understanding the relationship between perimeter and area is a difficult concept for…

Most teachers try to avoid having students experience uncertainty in their schoolwork. But if we want to prepare students to tackle complex problems (and the uncertainty that accompanies such problems), we must give them learning experiences that involve feeling unsure and sometimes even confused. Beghetto presents five strategies that help…

We present a preliminary theory of innovation in social work science. The focus of the piece is two case studies from our work that illustrate the social nature of innovations in the science of social work. This inductive theory focuses on a concept we refer to as transformative innovation, wherein two sets of individuals who possess different…