The research described in this article concludes that the widely cited U-curve hypothesis is no longer supported by research data because the adjustment of international postgraduate students is a complex phenomenon that does not fit easily with attempts to define and categorize it. Methodological issues, different internal and external factors,…

Algebra has been explicit in many school curriculum programs from the early years but there are competing views on what content and approaches are appropriate for different levels of schooling. This study investigated 12-13-year-old Australian students' algebraic thinking in a hybrid environment of functional and equation-based approaches to…

A study plan is the choice of concepts and the organization and sequencing of the concepts to be covered in an educational course. While a good study plan is essential for the success of any course offering, the design of study plans currently remains largely a manual task. We present a novel data-driven method, which given a list of concepts can…

This study examined prospective middle school mathematics teachers' problem-posing skills by investigating their ability to associate linear graphs with daily life situations. Prospective teachers were given linear graphs and asked to pose problems that could potentially be represented by the graphs. Their answers were analyzed in two stages. In…

Stephanie Whitney teaches in the department of teacher education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Her interest is in how students reason and make sense of mathematics, and how teachers can promote this behavior. Students should engage in reasoning and sense making daily in their mathematics classes. It is often through students'…

Pre-assessment has a bad reputation, write Hockett and Doubet--but that's largely because it's often misused solely to compare pre- and post-results. Used this way, pre-assessment serves as little more than a thief of instruction and a discouraging exercise for students. The authors describe how teachers can design thoughtful…

This study explored factors of students' mental states, including emotion, intention, internal mental representation, and external mental representation, which can affect their learning performance. In evaluating students' mental states during the science learning process and the relationship between mental states and learning…

This paper reports an analysis of the website of an education authority in the state of Queensland, Australia during the changeover from a state-based curriculum to a national curriculum. The paper's value lies in the capture of an exact moment of change. Kress and van Leeuwen's grammar of visual design is employed to analyse the changes to the…

With the rise of the internet, mobile communications, electronic transactions, and personal broadcasting, the scale of connectedness has grown immensely. Not only can an individual interact with thousands and millions of others, but details about those interactions are being stored in databases, for later retrieval and analysis. Two key concepts…

Those who come to Cambridge soon learn that the fastest route between Harvard and MIT is by the subway. For many students, this short ride is a quick and easy way to link physics and calculus. A simple, homemade accelerometer provides all the instrumentation necessary to produce accurate graphs of acceleration, velocity, and displacement position…

Graphing polar curves typically involves a combination of three traditional techniques, all of which can be time-consuming and tedious. However, an alternative method--graphing the polar function on a rectangular plane--simplifies graphing, increases student understanding of the polar coordinate system, and reinforces graphing techniques learned…

Monitoring and control over the process of studying the distance learning course are based on solving the problem of making out an adequate integral mark to the educatee for mastering entire study course, by testing results. It is suggested to use the degree of correspondence between educatee's thesaurus and the study course thesaurus as an…

The current study evaluated preferences of undergraduate students for graphic feedback on percentage of incorrect performance versus feedback on percentage of correct performance. A total of 108 participants were enrolled in the study and received graphic feedback on performance on 12 online quizzes. One half of participants received graphic…

Social bookmarking systems allow people to create pointers to Web resources in a shared, Web-based environment. These services allow users to add free-text labels, or "tags", to their bookmarks as a way to organize resources for later recall. Ease-of-use, low cognitive barriers, and a lack of controlled vocabulary have allowed social…

The mathematical concept of function has been revisited and further developed with regularity since its introduction in ancient Babylonia (Kleiner, 1989). The difficulty of the concept of a function contributes to complications when students learn of functions and their graphs (Leinhardt, Zaslavsky, & Stein, 1990). To understand the concept of…