This case study describes how our research team conducted the qualitative think-aloud approach (or cognitive pretesting) to obtaining cognitive validity evidence for a biology inference-making and reasoning measure for undergraduate students. The main goal of our work was to gather high-quality student think-aloud data of reasoning while they were…

This book examines research on creative thinking, both current and historical. It explores two dimensions of human thought (time and space) and two modes of thinking (conscious and unconscious) as well as both left and right brain functions and artistic and scientific creative activities. The book proposes a "Double Circulation" model of…

In what ways do Jewish and Muslim faith schools in Britain play a role in promoting and contributing to community cohesion? What 21st-century skills around intercultural understanding do they foster? This book examines the nuances of faith in school settings and draws on a case study of Jewish and Muslim faith schools. The authors show how these…

Students at the junior high school (JHS) level often cannot use their knowledge of physics for explaining and predicting phenomena. We claim that this difficulty stems from the fact that explanations are multi-step reasoning tasks, and students often lack the qualitative problem-solving strategies needed to guide them. This article describes a new…

We present a study of the ascending vertical motion of a self-propelled body under a uniform gravitational field suffering the action of two different types of air friction forces: linear on the velocity, which is valid for slowly moving bodies, and quadratic on the velocity. We study the special case where the thrust force is a decreasing…

Common examples of graphic organizers include flow diagrams, concept maps, and decision trees. The author has created a novel type of graphic organizer called a decision map. A decision map is a directional heuristic that helps learners solve problems within a generic framework. It incorporates questions that the user must answer and contains…

Alcohol use and abuse are cause for concern because the educational process and quality of campus student life are disrupted. Abusive drinking can have serious consequences on all areas of college life, including economic, health, social and educational. Heavy alcohol use may result in personal injury, drunk driving, alcohol overdose, unplanned…

This paper explores the academic success of NCAA Division I collegiate student athletes that enroll in engineering majors. At the University of South Carolina, which is a member of the NCAA Division I Southeastern Conference, nineteen engineering students were on an active athletic roster during the spring semester of 2005. The mean cumulative…

The case-based study, which presents students with a dilemma that encourages exploration, is becoming a popular method for teaching biology. This Web-based report offers one such case study that asks readers to solve problems and make decisions based on information gathered as they engage with characters or situations in the story. The basis for…

Our study concerns the analysis of teacher and student activities. Secondary school 6th grade students were confronted, for the first time, with solving equations. We used our cognitive models of students and experts (in algebraic calculations) for analyzing the teaching process and the cognitive functioning of students. Our model led us to…

Building on previous research on the tendency in students of diverse ages to overrely on proportionality in different domains of mathematics (e.g., geometry, probability), this study shows that--when confronted with missing-value word problems--Flemish primary school pupils strongly tend to apply proportional solution strategies, also in cases…

A study was conducted with forty-seven preservice childhood (elementary) education teachers (42 F, 5 M) enrolled in two mathematics methods classes taught by the same instructor to determine the effect of these college students making curriculum materials appropriate for upper elementary students on the preservice teachers' knowledge of…

Written for a variety of audiences, this volume describes the University of Western Ontario Preschool Project in sufficient detail to permit its replication; findings of formative and summative program evaluations are reported along with research developing new criterion measures of social competence. Begun in 1973, the program was primarily…