Students' engagement with fictions in the form of "word problems" plays an important role in classroom practice as well as in theories of mathematical learning. Drawing on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, I show that this activity can be seen as a form of "play" or "game," where it is pretended that…

National and international organizations have identified schools as having an "unparalleled" potential to offer supportive services for children's mental health needs. This article reviews research and practice related to children's grief and specifies strategies for classroom-based interventions. In particular, school psychologists are encouraged…

An in-class activity is described that can be used not only to motivate hypothesis testing, but also to understand and compute the p-value and power in a statistical test. (Contains 3 figures.)

Nowadays, computer aided design (CAD) is widely used by designers. Would children learn to draw more easily and more efficiently if they were taught with computerised tools? To answer this question, we made an experiment designed to compare two methods for children to do the same drawing: the classical "pen and paper" method and a CAD…

We often hear that the most important role of education is to teach children to think creatively and effectively. Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) has recognised the importance of nurturing children from young and aimed to shift from "academic rote learning" to more experiential learning. Since 2003, mandated nationwide skill…

With the shift in language teaching towards a more learner-centered approach, there is now an emphasis on considering learners' views on what goes on in the classroom. Involving learners in selecting and evaluating classroom activities as well as listening to their voices and preferences can be helpful for teachers in planning lesson and designing…

Drawing on Vygostky's zone of proximal development this study explores the ways preservice teachers engage with The Human Bean Activity that was designed to make visible the abstract idea of identity and community. This qualitative narrative analysis explores the talk produced by 47 predominantly White, straight, and female preservice…

It is common practice in elementary science classrooms to have students create representations, such as drawings, as a way of exploring new content. While numerous studies suggest the benefits of representation in science, the majority focus on specific, canonical representations, such as graphs. Few offer insight or guidance regarding how…

The purpose of this investigation is to describe an implementation of a modeling task using mock data from an ancient archeological find. Students discover the relationship between the height of a person and his or her stride length. Qualitative data from student discussions document thinking and reasoning.

This study explores the impact of classroom relationships on student engagement. To determine whether improved classroom relations lead to higher levels of student engagement, surveys were distributed to 2,340 students from 117 fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms. Respondents reported the degree to which they felt support from teachers,…

This paper reports a study on designing and testing an instructional sequence for the teaching and learning of the concept of angle in Indonesian primary schools. The study's context is employing the current reform movement adopting "Pendidikan Matematika Realistik Indonesia" (an Indonesian version of Realistic Mathematics Education).…

The importance of argument in science teaching is a hot topic. Educators are told "doing science" doesn't just involve following a scientific method; it involves the restructuring and refinement of ideas through negotiation and critique with other people. Understanding the importance of argument is one thing, but even for the…

The author provides a general model to incentivize student involvement in an economics course on an ongoing basis. Rather than presenting students with a discrete number of diverse experiments to illustrate different economic concepts, he opts for the adoption of a single experiment that lives for the duration of the semester. This approach…

A learning module for molecular level analysis of protein structure and ligand/drug interaction through the visualization of X-ray diffraction is presented. Using DeepView as molecular model visualization software, students learn about the general concepts of protein structure. This Biochemistry classroom exercise is designed to be carried out by…

This quantitative action science research study utilized a causal-comparative experimental research design in order to determine if the use of student response systems (clickers), as an active learning strategy in a community college course, improved student performance in the course. Students in the experimental group (n = 26) used clickers to…