STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education creates critical thinkers, increases science literacy, and enables the next generation of innovators, which leads to new products and processes that sustain our economy (Hossain & Robinson, 2012). We have been hearing the warnings for several years, that there simply are not enough…

On October 14, 2013 the Mathematics Education Department at Teachers College hosted a full-day conference focused on the Common Core Standards Mathematical Modeling requirements to be implemented in September 2014 and in honor of Professor Henry Pollak's 25 years of service to the school. This article is adapted from my talk at this conference…

In this paper the teachers' learning journey on designing a mathematics problem that involves a real-life context is reported. This is part of a larger project undertaken in a primary school in Singapore where the teachers were engaged in planning, observing and critiquing mathematics lessons to investigate teaching and learning. These unique…

This article contributes to ongoing discussions related to the nature, scope, and methods of faith-learning integration. The "initiation" approach developed by Tim McDonough (2011) is adapted to faith-learning integration in an attempt to bridge polarizing discussions regarding indoctrination versus rational autonomy and critical…

Authoring tools for Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) have been shown to decrease the amount of time that it takes to develop an ITS. However, most of these tools currently do not extend to collaborative ITSs. In this paper, we illustrate an extension to the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) to allow for development of collaborative ITSs that…

The links between the mathematical and cognitive models that interact during problem solving are explored with the purpose of developing a reference framework for designing problem-posing tasks. When the process of solving is a successful one, a solver successively changes his/her cognitive stances related to the problem via transformations that…

The objective of this research is to ascertain whether new instructional techniques can improve critical thinking. To achieve this goal, two different instruction techniques (ARDESOS--group 1--and DIAPROVE--group 2--) were studied and a pre-post assessment of critical thinking in various dimensions such as argumentation, inductive reasoning,…

Analyzing students' mathematical explanations can be a powerful tool to enhance teachers' practice, but collecting these explanations can be cumbersome. Here, we describe our quest to find effective tools to make explanations accessible to elementary (K-6th) teachers. First, we describe how digital audio recordings enabled teachers to focus on the…

In the information explosion era with constant changes of information, educators have promoted various effective learning strategies for students adapting to the complex modern society. The impact and influence of traditional teaching method have information technology integrated modern instruction and science concept learning play an important…

Teachers play a vital role in nurturing and shaping learners in school. Extensive researches have been conducted showing that beliefs in the nature of teaching and learning held by the teachers will affect their actual classroom practices. In Malaysia, not many studies have been done on mathematics teacher's beliefs at the national level. The…

Online learning from video modeling examples, in which a human model demonstrates and explains how to perform a learning task, is an effective instructional method that is increasingly used nowadays. However, model characteristics such as gender tend to differ across videos, and the model-observer similarity hypothesis suggests that such…

This article describes an interdisciplinary project that created awareness of female scientists in a public Montessori classroom. Every spring, the author's sixth-grade students write an educational play in which the entire class participates. Following an underwhelming response to asking students who are their favorite female scientists, the…

The study explored the curriculum guidelines and primary school teachers' conceptions and practices of the Multiple Solutions Approach (MSA) in teaching mathematics using basic qualitative research design. Informal conversation interviews (ICIs), observations, video and document analyses were used to collect data. Participants included a purposive…

This paper describes the problem-solving studio (PSS) learning environment. PSS was designed to teach students how to solve difficult analytical engineering problems without resorting to rote memorization of algorithms, while at the same time developing their deep conceptual understanding of the course topics. There are several key features of…

Statistics is taught in mathematics courses in all school levels. We suggest that using rich tasks in statistics can develop statistical reasoning and create both intra and interdisciplinary links in students. In this paper, we present three case studies where middle school mathematics teachers used different tasks in lessons on pie charts. We…