This study adds momentum to the ongoing discussion clarifying the merits of visualization and analysis in mathematical thinking. Our goal was to gain understanding of three calculus students' mental processes and images used to create meaning for derivative graphs. We contrast the thinking processes of these three students as they attempted to…

Middle school teachers tend to rely heavily on texts that have become increasing more visual. There is little information available about the graphical demands of general middle grades' science texts. The purpose of this study was to quantify the type and quality of the graphical representations and how they interacted with the textual material in…

An emerging line of research demonstrates a distinction between social and natural sciences; natural sciences devote more page space in journals to data graphics than social sciences. The present survey asked how the subdiscipline of Education, Special Education, compares to other disciplines of science. Also, how do the Individuals with…

This paper reports on a design experiment conducted to explore the construction of meanings by 17 year old students, emerging from their interpretations and uses of algebraic like formalism. The students worked collaboratively in groups of two or three, using MoPiX, a constructionist computational environment with which they could create concrete…

Students in a general education science course made significant gains in scientific reasoning skills when they were taught using carefully designed hands-on activities and writing assignments. The activities required students to make use of scientific skills such as graphing, predicting outcomes under changing conditions, or designing experiments,…

We present a novel approach to the automated marking of student programming assignments. Our technique quantifies the structural similarity between unmarked student submissions and marked solutions, and is the basis by which we assign marks. This is accomplished through an efficient novel graph similarity measure ("AssignSim"). Our experiments…

The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard Test is an assessment that measures the degree to which middle school-aged students learning English as a second language have attained proficiency in the academic and social English skills representative of English-medium instructional environments. The assessment measures skills in three areas: listening…

In this experiment, physical science students measured the mass of several soda cans, measured the mass and volume of water displaced when these cans were placed in water, and determined whether these cans sank or floated in water. Then, the students plotted graphs of the mass of displaced water versus the volume of displaced water, the mass of…

This paper identifies and discusses misconceptions that students have in making judgments of center and variability when data are presented graphically. An assessment addressing interpreting center and variability in histograms and stem-and-leaf plots was administered to, and follow-up interviews were conducted with, undergraduates enrolled in…

The authors explore the importance of "range" and its relationship to continuously differentiable functions that have inverses when their graphs are reflected about lines other than y = x. Some open questions are posed for the reader. (Contains 5 figures.)

This article describes use of a novel statistical activity with primary school children.

Let G be a simple undirected graph. To each vertex assign one of two colours say red or blue. A solitaire game is played on G as follows. A move consists of selecting a blue vertex, inverting the colours of its neighbours and then deleting the chosen vertex and all edges incident upon it. The goal is to delete all the vertices. The question of…

This article presents a problem that can help high school students develop the concept of instantaneous velocity and connect it with the slope of a tangent line to the graph of position versus time. It also gives a method for determining the tangent line to the graph of a polynomial function at any point without using calculus. (Contains 1 figure.)

The purpose of this research project was to conclude if motivational graphing strategies, when used in Math Response to Intervention (RTI) classes, could increase the students' ability to reach their goals. To complete this investigation the researcher assessed the Math RTI students' ability to count orally within one minute on a biweekly basis.…

This study concerns 182 first year mathematics undergraduates' perspectives on the tangent line of function graph in the light of a previous study on Year 12 pupils' perspectives. The aim was the investigation of tangency images that settle after undergraduates' distancing from the notion for a few months and after their participation in…