State accommodations policies affect the way that students with disabilities are included in large-scale assessments. This article uses information collected by the National Center on Educational Outcomes to analyze how accommodations policies changed between 1993 and 2005. Throughout the 1990s, state accommodations policies often sought to level…

Research Experiences for Teachers (RET), funded by the National Science Foundation, offer teachers an opportunity to participate in current, hands-on scientific research in laboratories across the United States. These experiences provide an avenue for teachers to understand the process of research and gain insight on emerging technologies with the…

Analysis of the constraints and potential of the artefact are necessary in order to point out the mathematical knowledge involved in using calculators. Analyzes and categorizes observations of students using graphic and symbolic calculators into profiles, illustrating the transformation of the calculator into an efficient mathematical instrument.…

Argues that the calculator is fallible as a repository of mathematical knowledge. Suggests that the calculator should be considered not only a labor-saving device but a learning device. Provides examples of the use of calculators as a learning device. Contains 16 references. (ASK)

The solutions of the discrete logistic growth model based on a difference equation and the continuous logistic growth model based on a differential equation are compared and contrasted. The investigation is conducted using a dynamic interactive spreadsheet. (Contains 5 figures.)

This paper reports on the experiences of students who were learning mathematics with CAS for a second consecutive school year. Evidence presented shows that nearly all students managed the challenging task of mastering the technical aspects of using CAS well. It also shows that the level of technical difficulty and the degree to which it presents…

Opportunity to Learn (OTL) stems from the basic premise that there is an important relationship between the quality and intensity of classroom instruction and students' levels of academic success. For many students with disabilities, an emphasis on OTL has become national priority, yet measuring its impact is a complex challenge. The first purpose…

Purpose: The ecological footprint represents a simple way to assess the amount of materials consumed and waste produced by a given entity. The approach has been applied to countries, towns, households, and more recently university campuses. One of the challenges of using the ecological footprint at a university is the difficulty of determining how…

We report on the contents and results for 360 students of a mathematics assessment administered at the start of the second-semester introductory chemistry course required for science and engineering majors at the University of Minnesota. This calculator-free, 20-question, 30-minute, multiple-choice, diagnostic quiz includes questions selected…

American students continue to struggle on measures of student achievement. This study employed Hierarchical Linear Modeling to estimate a two-level model and examine the influences of calculator use and teachers' instructional practices on student achievement in mathematics amongst first-grade students. The outcome variable was mathematics test…

Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills of their adult populations in order to monitor how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the new information world. The current paper provides an overview of the conceptual framework for the assessment of numeracy developed for the OECD's…

Two intervention studies are described. Both were designed to study the effects of teaching children about the inverse relation between addition and subtraction. The interventions were successful with 8-year-old children in Study 1 and to a limited extent with 5-year-old children in Study 2. In Study 1 teaching children about inversion increased…

At universities in the faculties of Engineering, Sciences, Business and Economics together with higher education in Computing, it is stated that because of the difficulty, calculators and computers can be used in Numerical Analysis (NA). In this study, the learning computer supported NA will be discussed together with important usage of the…

Ongoing professional development programs are required by teachers in order to become more effective in teaching. Although, in-service courses are offered to enhance the teachers' professional skills but the courses are not relevant to their needs. This may be due to the administrators' assumptions of the teachers' needs rather than what the…

People remember information better if they generate the information while studying rather than read the information. However, prior research has not investigated whether this generation effect extends to related but unstudied items and has not been conducted in classroom settings. We compared third graders' success on studied and unstudied…