The concepts of electronegativity and classical electronegativity scales are briefly described. Electronegativity scales have practical quantitative applications, and this work suggests activities which can assist students select the scales for use in chemistry applications. It provided examples of the use of an appropriate electronegativity…

A single discrete random variable is depicted by a stick diagram, a 2D picture. Naturally, to visualize a bivariate discrete distribution, one can use a bivariate stick diagram, a 3D picture. Unfortunately, many students have difficulty understanding and processing 3D pictures. Therefore, we construct an alternative 2D disc plot to depict the…

This paper initiates a teaching sequence that focuses on building up equivalent definitions to the standard ones for the limit concept in Real Analysis. It comprises two parts: The first provides a classroom assignment where students, guided by Analysis lecturers, are led to develop an alternative definition to the [epsilon] - [delta] one for…

Conceptual knowledge encompasses understanding the interrelationships among multiple pieces of information. Misconceptions of these interrelationships illustrate the need for effective educational strategies to facilitate conceptual change, with the goal of facilitating changes in learner understanding to appropriate, accurate, and complete…

Throughout the history of science, novel ideas that diverge from mainstream thought have often been met with condemnation, derision, and ad hominem attacks. These reactions have sometimes led to the premature rejection of such ideas, only for them to be later revived and even accepted as the prevailing paradigm. While robust debate is essential in…

There is an infinity of realized and potential creative things, creative ideas, and creative performances, and yet there is no such thing as creativity, at least not in the two ways most of us think about creativity. (1) There is no general essence of creativity, no indispensable factor or shared quality that is an intrinsic part of all creative…

In our rush to get to deeper learning, it's easy to undervalue the essential role that "shallow" understanding (e.g., basic factual knowledge) plays in students' capacity to explore and understand content more fully, write Kevin Krahenbuhl and John Lando Carter. In this article, they outline three strategies to ensure students have a…

Urine formation in the nephron can be a very intimidating concept to students. This straightforward activity, performed by students during the nephron lecture, can help enforce the concepts as they uncover the structures and functions involved in urine formation.

As students have struggled to use the "chip model" (i.e., red and yellow chips representing positive and negative numbers) to model integer addition and subtraction and have found it confusing, the authors developed a series of activities based on adding and removing opposite objects to and from a boat to better help students in this…

We introduce learning modules in cryptography that can be crafted to motivate many abstract mathematical ideas, and we illustrate with a sample module. These modules can be used in a variety of ways, such as the core for a cryptography course or as motivating topics in other courses such as abstract and linear algebra or number theory.

"Decolonial refusals" theory, forged through fieldwork in Puerto Rico, is used to question "conceptual disjunctures" in binary views of center-periphery relations. Grad students here are not merely "voices from the margins," as seen from the "imperial north." Their autoethnographies may be dispatches from…

A concept-heavy engineering module was offered to introduce the experience of solving full-scale real-world energy-related engineering problems within a classroom environment and prepare students to be professionally ready for the industry. The widely practiced hybrid problem-based learning (h-PBL) pedagogical approach was adopted for the first 2…

Teachers working to transform classrooms towards equity and justice must resist the continual press of dominant culture, which seeks to reproduce longstanding arrangements of inequity and injustice. Little is known about the learning that supports teachers in this resistance. This article offers the Teacher Learning for Transformation (TLT)…

This article discusses two mechanisms through which understanding static mathematical concepts (basic and more advanced mathematical concepts) in terms of fictive motions or motion events enhance our understanding of these concepts. It is suggested that at least two mechanisms are involved in this enhancing process. The first mechanism enables us…

An exciting recent development in chemistry has been the ability to control nanoparticle crystal morphology or shape. Nanoparticles of different shapes present different crystal surfaces (or facets) with respect to the surrounding environment. Synthetic control over nanoparticle morphology has enabled the study of the influence of surface facets…