Presents guidelines for designing and using extensions, which are exercises that follow or extend the basic presentation of an idea, in the mathematics area of the Montessori program to give children more experience and depth as they explore key mathematical concepts. Describes extensions that address counting, sorting, and working with decimals.…

Describes three activities using dominoes, playing cards, and the calendar to give students mathematical experiences reinforcing basic skills and problem-solving strategies that involve patterns, relationships, and functions. Students discover mathematical relationships underlying the magic tricks used in the activities. (MDH)

Proposes a theory of cognitive processes in doing and learning place value arithmetic. Discusses a computer model that simulates the learning of multicolumn subtraction under one-on-one tutoring to measure the relative difficulty of two methods of subtraction. The model predicts that regrouping is more difficult to learn than an alternative…

Forty-six mildly handicapped junior high school students were paired and assigned to cooperative, competitive, individualistic, and no goal control conditions in a computer-assisted computational setting. Findings indicated students improved rates of correct responding regardless of goal condition. (Author/DB)

Among 1,453 male and 1,133 female academically talented 7- to 11-year-old students, boys performed better overall than girls on mathematical reasoning. Gender differences appeared as early as second grade, varying according to mathematics subskills. Male performance was better on tasks requiring application of algebraic rules and understanding of…

Presents four stoichiometric problems and their solutions that use spot metal prices quoted from the newspaper to integrate economics and chemistry. (MDH)

Presents a class activity in which students use trigonometry to calculate the height attained by a water rocket. Provides a lesson plan that includes a list of materials needed, procedures to carry out the experiment, suggestions to extend the activity, and a reproducible worksheet for the students to register their calculations. (MDH)

Young, middle-aged, and older adults practiced a squaring algorithm. Working-memory and calculation errors were counted. Practice reduced the number of both types of errors; eliminated initial age-related calculation error differences; and slightly reduced initial age-related working-memory error differences. (BC)

Preschool children (n=115) in Poland were tested in five areas: counting, equipotency of sets, dividing, adding, and comparing. Results showed that these children already had informal knowledge of many of the concepts and skills included in the mathematics curriculum in the early grades. (PDD)

Illustrates how a computer software symbolic-processing program can be easily incorporated into an advanced undergraduate microeconomics course. Symbolic-processing programs are relatively sophisticated software packages that combine numeric, symbolic, and graphic computation in a single unified computing environment. Includes examples of…

First-grade children at risk for a learning disability (LD) in mathematics, reading, or both were compared to a control group on experimental tasks assessing number comprehension and production skills, counting knowledge, arithmetic skills, working memory, and ease of retrieving information from long-term memory. Found different patterns of intact…

Interviews with five Shoshoni elders during a 1-year study showed that mathematics was integral to daily life and reflective of their culture. Classroom activities are described that integrate traditional Shoshoni mathematical knowledge into mathematics instruction. This knowledge may help Shoshoni students develop a deeper understanding of…

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is…

We present the design principles for a new kind of computer system that helps students learn algebra. The fundamental idea is to have a system based on the microworld paradigm that allows students to make their own calculations, as they do with paper and pencil, without being obliged to use commands, and to verify the correctness of these…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…