This study focused on a population of female engineering students, probing the influences of their secondary school experience on their choice to pursue an engineering course of study at university. The motivating question is: Do unique opportunities exist in an all-female secondary school mathematics classroom, which impact a young woman's…

Students' mathematical problem-solving experiences are fraught with failed attempts, wrong turns, and partial successes that move in fits and jerks, oscillating between periods of inactivity, stalled progress, rapid advancement, and epiphanies. Students' problem-solving journals, however, do not always reflect this rather organic process. Without…

To meet the goal of "preparing people for an ever-changing world", instructional programs need to apply strategies that focus on the development of critical thinking, problem solving, research, and lifelong learning. Those goals require a sociocultural approach to instruction emphasizing learning from experience and discourse. Sociocultural…

Problem solving theory and practice suggest that thinking is more important to solving problems than knowledge and that it is possible to teach thinking in situations where little or no knowledge of the problem is needed. Such an assumption has led problem solving advocates to champion "content-less heuristics" as the primary element of problem…

These modules develop two prevalent explanations among political scientists of who gets what in the budgetary process. Specifically, the problem of how an agency's level of appropriations changes over time is addressed. It is noted that budgeting is a political process in the classic sense, in that it elicits and embodies patterns of conflict and…

This module is designed for students with a high school algebra background. The goal is to present the elements of the group idea, primarily by way of a geometric model, and to see its application to the study of kinship relations within certain human groups. The material opens with a presentation of clans in a hypothetical society in an early…

One of the great strengths of mathematics is viewed as the fact that apparently diverse real-world questions translate into that same mathematical question. It is felt that studying a mathematical problem can often bring about a tool of surprisingly diverse usability. The module is geared to help users know how to use graph theory to model simple…

This study aimed at investigating the relations between students' strategic behaviour during problem solving, task performance and domain-specific self-concept. A total of 167 first- and second-graders were individually examined in tasks involving cubes assembly and in academic self-concept in mathematics. Students' cognitive, metacognitive, and…

There is need to reform teacher education programs through the creation of active learning environments that support and improve the depth and scope of student learning. Specifically, teachers should provide intellectually powerful, learner-centered, and technology-rich environments for students without undermining sound pedagogical practices.…

This paper argues that the introduction of the scientific method in the very rich environments of the natural sciences or human sciences may disguise the process and create difficulties for students because of the multiplicity of variables involved, whereas the variables present in a mathematical context can be readily manipulated and their…

This study examines strategic and semantic aspects of the answers given by preschool children to class inclusion problems. Results show that children understand the semantics of inclusion but are unable to coordinate their semantic knowledge with enumeration strategy. (Author/DEP)

Describes push-back leadership, a model of leadership based on the work of Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linksky. Argues that the two key roles of the leader are to give the work back to people and to keep them within a healthy range of disequilibrium that generates creativity and innovation to solve organizational problems. (Author/LRW)

This article analyses mathematical modelling from several different perspectives and contrasts modelling with problem solving. Then it describes the ways in which modelling, applications, and problem solving are approached in several Latin American countries. It further describes workshops for secondary schools and for university teachers in which…

Progress monitoring tools have been shown to be essential elements in current approaches to intervention problem-solving models. Such tools have been valuable not only in marking individual children's level of performance relative to peers but also in measuring change in skill level in a way that can be attributed to intervention and development.…

Two general models exist for implementing Response to Intervention (RtI) for struggling students, the standard protocol model and the problem-solving model. This study examined the long-term outcomes of one example of the problem-solving method, the Instructional Support Team (IST), in a field setting. Academic records of 32 students were reviewed…