Continually increasing demands are being placed on the educational system to prepare students with technical skills due to the exponential implementation of information, technology and automation in the workforce. Students should work with design, problemsolving and computational methods and tools early on in their school lives in basic education…

Much data, both published and anecdotal, have shown that students grasp scientific concepts more easily when they are directly involved in the learning via lab experiments or other hands-on activities. Hands-on or experiential learning also appears to aid in students' ability to retain scientific theory. One way to engage students in a first-year…

The effects of poverty on important outcome measures are devastating and well documented, but the conceptualization and operationalization of socioeconomic status (SES) are underdeveloped. Various indicators of SES are useful for different purposes. Free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) status is commonly used because of its convenience and predictive…

The purpose of this research was to describe the positions and causes of students' errors in algebraic thinking based on the cognitive style. This study was qualitative research with subject consisting of twelve students. The results showed that (1) students with Field Independent type tended to make errors at the stage of comprehension,…

The purposes of this study were twofold. The first was to test the efficacy of two versions of the "Super Solvers" (SS) intervention for fourth- and fifth-grade students at-risk for mathematics learning disabilities (MLD). The second was to test the value of adding an error analysis component to the SS intervention. Students were…

The role of programming in computing education for children has grown rapidly in recent years with the proliferation of specially designed programming tools, which is grounded on Seymour Papert's theoretical work in Constructionism. Studies show that some children can develop computational thinking skills and practices with programming activities…

The African Data Initiative started as a crowd-sourced campaign to improve the teaching of statistics in African universities. The analysis of climate data provides one suitable context to illustrate ideas that lead to a radical new form of teaching. The problem within the context comes first, the technicalities are largely reduced -- mathematics…

This paper presents an architecture designed for simulation serious games, which automatically generates game-based scenarios adapted to learner's learning progression. We present three central modules of the architecture: (1) the learner model, (2) the adaptation module and (3) the logs module. The learner model estimates the progression of the…

Model uncertainty is pervasive in social science. A key question is how robust empirical results are to sensible changes in model specification. We present a new approach and applied statistical software for computational multimodel analysis. Our approach proceeds in two steps: First, we estimate the modeling distribution of estimates across all…

In many modeling contexts, the variables in the model are linear composites of the raw items measured for each participant; for instance, regression and path analysis models rely on scale scores, and structural equation models often use parcels as indicators of latent constructs. Currently, no analytic estimation method exists to appropriately…

Jagadguru Shankaracharya Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha (commonly abbreviated to Bharati Krishna) was a scholar who studied ancient Indian Veda texts and between 1911 and 1918 (vedicmaths.org, n.d.) and wrote a collection of 16 major rules and a number of minor rules which have collectively become known as the "sutras of Vedic…

In this paper, we discuss the Experimental Mathematics course taught at Valparaiso University since 2009. We focus on aspects of the course that facilitate students' abilities to ask and explore their own research questions.

Two experiments examined whether concrete models support place value learning. In Experiment 1 (N = 149), 7-year-olds were trained with either a) symbols alone or b) symbols and base-10 blocks. Children in both groups showed significant growth overall, but there were specific effects favoring one training type over another. Symbols-only training…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

Counting problems offer rich opportunities for students to engage in mathematical thinking, but they can be difficult for students to solve. In this paper, we present a study that examines student thinking about one concept within counting, factorials, which are a key aspect of many combinatorial ideas. In an effort to better understand students'…