In an educational setting, an estimate of the difficulty of Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs), a commonly used strategy to assess learning progress, constitutes very useful information for both teachers and students. Since human assessment is costly from multiple points of view, automatic approaches to MCQ item difficulty estimation are…

Mathematical problem-solving places heavy demands on children's developing working memory capacity. This review examines how offloading numerical information using embodied (e.g. finger counting) or external tools (e.g. manipulatives) can reduce cognitive load and improve mathematical task performance. Strategic offloading emerges in childhood;…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

Research suggests that collaborative learning may enhance the benefits to learners when solving cognitively demanding tasks. However, there are concerns about how students with different achievement and engagement levels perceive these benefits. This study examines how students with varying achievement and engagement levels respond to…

School turnaround efforts have had limited success in prior research, largely due to their grounding in deficit narratives about schools, communities, and families and singular focus on academics. Community school approaches have promise, and are increasingly used by state and local education authorities, as not just a means to engage communities…

Minimum Competency Assessment (MCA) is the latest assessment conducted nationally in Indonesia. MCA measures students' cognitive in literacy and numeracy. This study illustrates the difficulty of students in solving numeracy questions in the minimum competency assessment. This research is included in case study research with a qualitative…

Designing balanced and optimized degree plans is a fundamental challenge in higher education, directly impacting student success, graduation rates, and institutional efficiency. This paper presents an innovative framework that addresses this challenge through a two-stage optimization approach. The first stage focuses on selecting a set of courses…

Solving a math word problem (MWP) requires understanding the mathematical components of the problem and an ability to decode the text. For some students, lower reading comprehension skills may make engagement with the mathematical content more difficult. Readability formulas (e.g., Flesch Reading Ease) are frequently used to assess reading…

Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields are in high demand. These fields all require sufficient math ability. However, many university students suffer from math anxiety. This study conducted an experiment to explore the influence of math anxiety on university students' challenging math problem-solving behavior and whether autonomy…

Strengthening lower secondary students' attitudes toward mathematics is key to addressing declining enrolments in higher-level courses. This mixed-methods study examined the alignment between students' perceived mathematics capability and study intentions, as well as demographic and attitudinal differences. Results suggest that students with…

Calls for high levels of participation and success in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) by all Australians exacerbates the need for research into improving participation in mathematics by students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Rogoff's three planes of analysis is used to foreground the institutional plane in a low…

This study utilizes an analysis of diminishing returns to examine the relationship between sample size and item parameter estimation precision when utilizing the Masters' Partial Credit Model for polytomous items. Item data from the standardization of the Batelle Developmental Inventory, 3rd Edition were used. Each item was scored with a…

This qualitative study aims to investigate novice undergraduate mathematics students' first encounter with the First Isomorphism Theorem, which is, more often than not, the pinnacle of a typical introductory course in Group Theory. Several studies have reported on the challenges that this mathematical result poses to inexperienced mathematicians,…

Textbooks play an important role in teachers' instructional decisions (Jones & Tarr, 2007), which consequently affects students' learning. This paper reports on a comparison of the elementary mathematics textbooks used in Iran and the United States, the Go-Math textbook. I analyzed topic sequences, frequency of the tasks, and cognitive demands…

In Ireland, Initial Teacher Education [ITE] standards require all teachers to possess an adequate level of numeracy themselves in order to teach for numeracy learning across the school curriculum. This paper reports on a study that investigated 204 pre-service post-primary teachers' numeracy capabilities. Analysis of questionnaire data from…