In the September 2010 issue of "Mathematics Teaching," Tom O'Brien offered practical advice about how to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and contrasted his point of view with that of H.H. Wu. In this article, the author revisits Tom's examples, drawing on his methodology while, hopefully, simplifying it and giving it…

Social work and social services are known to be beneficial to society, but to date no systematic valuation of their contribution has been attempted. The aim of this article is to advance our ability to quantify both the known direct benefits and some of the positive externalities of social work. The authors make the case of why valuation is…

Purpose: To promote sustainable agriculture, various development projects are encouraging farmers around Madagascar's Lake Alaotra to adopt conservation agriculture techniques. This article's objective is to analyze the capacity of a project-funded advisory system to accompany such an innovation and to design and implement an advisory method aimed…

This paper investigates four methods of linear equating under the common item nonequivalent groups design. Three of the methods are well known: Tucker, Angoff-Levine, and Congeneric-Levine. A fourth method is presented as a variant of the Congeneric-Levine method. Using simulation data generated from the three-parameter logistic IRT model we…

Diagnostic assessment approaches intend to provide fine-grained reports of what students know and can do, focusing on their areas of strengths and weaknesses. However, current application of such diagnostic approaches is limited by the scoring method for item responses; important diagnostic information, such as type of errors and strategy use is…

Traditional methods for system performance analysis have long relied on a mix of queuing theory, detailed system knowledge, intuition, and trial-and-error. These approaches often require construction of incomplete gray-box models that can be costly to build and difficult to scale or generalize. In this thesis, we present a black-box analysis…

As anyone who has taught or taken a statistics course knows, statistical calculations can be tedious and error-prone, with the details of a calculation sometimes distracting students from understanding the larger concepts. Traditional statistics courses typically use scientific calculators, which can relieve some of the tedium and errors but…

This paper explores the nature and source of mathematics homework and teachers' and students' perspectives about the role of mathematics homework. The subjects of the study are three grade 8 mathematics teachers and 115 of their students. Data from field notes, teacher interviews and student questionnaire are analysed using qualitative methods.…

The present study aims at showing the effectiveness of a suggested training program for staff members at Teachers' College of King Saud University to develop their skills of using virtual classrooms. The research is empirical as it used two experimental groups. The first group is taught how to use the common teaching method and the second group is…

In an interview titled "The Janus-Face of Politicized Art," Jacques Ranciere describes his methodology as follows: "I always try to think in terms of horizontal distributions, combinations between systems of possibilities, not in terms of surface and substratum. Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of…

Digital cognitive games (DCGs) are games whose primary purpose is to mediate (i.e., support, develop, and enhance) cognitive activities such as problem solving, decision making, planning, and critical reasoning. As these games increase in popularity and usage, more attention should be paid to their design. Currently, there is a lack of design…

It is important for educational assessment bodies to demonstrate how they are seeking to meet the demands of validity. The approach to validity taken here assumes a "consequentialist" view where the appropriacy of the inferences made on the basis of assessment results is seen as central. This paper describes the development of a…

This article reviews the literature reporting engagement (enrollment, attendance, and attrition) in culturally adapted parent training for disruptive behavior among racial/ethnic minority parents of children ages 2 to 7 years. The review describes the reported rates of engagement in adapted interventions and how engagement is analyzed in studies,…

This article proposes a methodology that could assist teachers in understanding their students' primary needs or interests to decide on the kind of examples or contexts to be used in the classroom. The methodology was tested on 100 volunteers from university (N = 50) and high school (N = 50) in Ankara, Turkey. The participants were asked to write…

This article describes a novel variation of the Body of Work method that uses construct maps to overcome problems of transparency, rater inconsistency, and scores gaps commonly occurring with the Body of Work method. The Body of Work method with construct maps was implemented to set cut-scores for two separate K-12 assessment programs in a large…