In a world where knowledge is a click away, today's students need information delivered in ways that meet their expectations as digital natives. Serious digital games are one way to meet the demand. This particularistic case study sought to understand agriculture teachers' experiences using a serious digital game in an introductory animal science…

Research-based digital games hold great potential to be effective tools in supporting next-generation science learning. However, as with all instructional materials, teachers significantly influence their implementation and contribute to their effectiveness. To more fully understand the contributions and challenges of teacher implementation of…

Traditional teacher education programs focus on pedagogy and, to a lesser extent, assessments of knowledge (Siedlecki, 2012). Pedagogy and assessments should be fundamental components of any secondary teacher's curriculum planning (Knight, Shum, & Littleton, 2014). This study sought to consider the possible effects of three pedagogical…

For Sigmund Freud, the terms "dreamwork" and "jokework" denoted the process by which the mind displaces social and psychological anxieties and permits them to emerge disguised in dreams and jokes. This article posits a similar process for "sandwork." Examining the ways people play with sand in its three basic…

In the knowledge-based economy, R&D centers in service industries increasingly depend on the performance of knowledge workers to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, these centers must give careful consideration to the performance assessment and continuous improvement of knowledge workers using appropriate performance assessment systems and…

We evaluated the effects of an activity schedule embedded within an iPad on varied play across applications. After establishing a pattern of repetitive gameplay, we taught three children with autism to follow the activity schedule using physical guidance. All participants increased their varied play to four applications per session and…

In this article, we provide a commentary on the current state of gamification in higher education by reviewing the research literature, noting a lack of research focused on the design of gamified postsecondary courses. To address this issue, we discuss four potential pitfalls instructors may encounter when designing gamified learning activities.…

The author showcases a number of readily available and affordable resources that may be used in mathematics classrooms to provide students with concrete learning experiences. Resources, alone, do not provide educational experiences unless they are accompanied by appropriate teaching to ensure rich and connected learning experiences.

Museums usually look for new educational tools to enhance their exhibition. The Oteiza's museum in Navarre (Spain) especially gives importance to the dissemination of Jorge Oteiza's work to children at schools. Consequently, a didactics section was created with the objective of developing activities and relationship with schools. Jorge Oteiza…

Children in the Czech Republic before the beginning of compulsory school attendance undergo assessment evaluating so called school readiness. The part of this evaluation is assessment of children's biological, mental, social and emotional readiness for the demands of school education. The assessment of gross motor skills is an important part of…

A clear understanding of climate change and its impacts on society is an integral component of scientific literacy today. However, college students in introductory and lower division science courses often struggle to connect with this material in a meaningful way when they do not see how it is relevant to their daily lives. To address this…

For well over a century, scientists have investigated individual differences in performance. The majority of studies have focused on either differences in practice, or differences in cognitive resources. However, the predictive ability of either practice or cognitive resources varies considerably across tasks. We are the first to examine task…

Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a…

Game historians usually trace the literary roots of role-playing games to J. R. R. Tolkien and other fantasy authors. In this article, the author argues that, although Tolkien indeed provided pioneer game creators with specific content, historians have missed the important early influence on game history of children's literature that advocates and…

Teaching determinants poses significant challenges to the instructor of a proof-based undergraduate linear algebra course. The standard definition by cofactor expansion is ugly, lacks symmetry, and is hard for students to use in proofs. We introduce a visual definition of the determinant that interprets permutations as arrangements of…