Given the progressive loss of influence for the school relative to television in youngsters' everyday lives, this article describes the procedure and the results of including cartoons in the physics curriculum in secondary education. Work was carried out intensively with a small group of pupils and sporadically with a larger group. In the first…

This article describes the author's experience of adopting a child-centered approach to his pedagogy. The approach has created many teachable moments for his students and has improved the quality of their musical interactions. The article also presents ideas and strategies about child-centered, problem-based learning applied to the elementary…

A very simple strategy for the solution of the Schrodinger equation of a particle moving in one dimension subjected to a generic potential is presented. This strategy is implemented in a computer program called Kmonodium, which is free and distributed under the General Public License (GPL).

Phyllis Whitin was interested in the role of communications in developing mathematical understanding among children. She designed a problem-posing explorations system, which encouraged children to think, question, solve problems and discuss their ideas, strategies and solutions.

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a method of student assisted learning in which a successful undergraduate student guides a team of 6-8 students engaged in solving problems developed by the course instructor. The peer leaders serve as role models for their students who want to become peer leaders and the leaders also recruit other students to…

This article is a case study, assisted by the collection of data which has been analysed as an evaluative measure, of the initial element of an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) module for a cohort of trainee teachers on a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course for primary school teaching. The standards which the…

Carry Groups are a wonderful collection of groups to introduce in an undergraduate Abstract Algebra course. These groups are straightforward to define but have interesting structures for students to discover. We describe these groups and give examples of in-class group projects that were developed and used by Miller.

The study we present tries to explore how first year engineering students formulate hypotheses in order to construct their own problem solving structure when confronted with problems in physics. Under the constructivistic perspective of the teaching-learning process, the formulation of hypotheses plays a key role in contrasting the coherence of…

In a time when nearly half the country's employees are currently working in self-directed work groups, successful team working within organizations is more important than ever. The Problem-Possibility-Pursuit-Presentation (PPPP) Portfolio Project is designed to give students an opportunity to experience teamwork in a meaningful fashion. This…

Groups are defined as a small, interdependent group of individuals who share a common identity and interact with one another, usually face to face over time. While groups can be an effective way to explore issues and provide creative solutions to problems, rarely do members in groups get through the process without encountering a difficult group…

We compared the effectiveness of a problem-solving and an external control intervention to teach social skills to five adults with mild intellectual disabilities. The social skills of ''responding to corrective feedback'' and ''managing conflict'' were targeted for intervention. Each participant received the problem-solving intervention with one…

A point "E" inside a triangle "ABC" can be coordinatized by the areas of the triangles "EBC," "ECA," and "EAB." These are called the barycentric coordinates of "E." It can also be coordinatized using the six segments into which the cevians through "E" divide the sides of "ABC," or the six angles into which the cevians through "E" divide the angles…

In this paper, we discuss issues in planning and conducting research into mathematics learning. We emphasize two central themes: (a) the learners mathematics (especially the issues and ideas, in given problem situations, that learners' choose to think about and to present) and (b) the kinds of knowledge that learners may be building (including…

Preschool children are often good at counting things but seem slow to learn that there is more to counting than simply finding out how many are in a single set. Counting is useful when comparing sets and when creating new sets to match existing ones. This is part of the numerical understanding that educators wish to foster in schools. In two…

A one-credit seminar course for junior-senior mathematics majors is described. The topic for the seminar is continued fractions, taught by a modified Moore Method, where the focus is on students creating their own mathematics. The students make conjectures after completing computational problems, then work on refining the needed hypotheses,…