The purposes of this publication are: (1) to report the status of higher education equity in the United States and to identify changes over time in measures of equity; and (2) to identify policies and practices that promote and hinder progress; and to illustrate the need for increased support of policies, programs and practices that not only…

This paper focuses on predicting drop-outs and school failures when student data has been enriched with data derived from students social behaviour. These data describe social dependencies gathered from e-mail and discussion board conversations, among other sources. We describe an extraction of new features from both student data and behaviour…

Graphs are widely used to present scientific information. Information presented in graphs can be classified into three kinds: explicit information, tacit information, and conclusive information. Reading information from graphs requires not only science content knowledge and understanding but also general logical reasoning. This study examined the…

In this article, the author discusses plans that were launched at three consecutive conferences on care for toddlers between 1929 and 1938 in the Netherlands. These plans and their realisation are evaluated in terms of what was seen as the missing link in the supply of institutional care for young children. The author identifies the professional…

This thesis investigates and develops a few acceleration techniques for the search engine algorithms used in PageRank and HITS computations. PageRank and HITS methods are two highly successful applications of modern Linear Algebra in computer science and engineering. They constitute the essential technologies accounted for the immense growth and…

The last ten years have seen an explosion of research in the zero-divisor graphs of commutative rings--by professional mathematicians "and" undergraduates. The objective is to find algebraic information within the geometry of these graphs. This topic is approachable by anyone with one or two semesters of abstract algebra. This article gives the…

Recursion is a concept that can be used to describe the phenomena and natural occurrences in many different fields. As many applications utilize computer software to model recursion, recursion is a particularly important concept in the computing discipline. However, it is a difficult concept for many undergraduate students to master. A Recursion…

One measure of the impact of a new idea in geography education is how well it is incorporated into teachers' everyday practice. "Spatial thinking" is not really a new idea in geography education; spatial analysis has long been one of its core traditions, but the use of the term is novel and only beginning to be widely used. By spatial thinking the…

Mathematics may be inconceivable without its diagrams and symbols--its representations. Mathematical representations help individuals organize their thinking; they bring a visual component to abstract ideas and serve as templates for computation with understanding. But the inevitability of representations is no guarantee that they are used…

The world is filled with information delivered through graphical representations--everything from voting trends to economic projections to health statistics. Whether comparing incomes of individuals by their level of education, tracking the rise and fall of state populations, or researching home ownership in different geographical areas, basic…

A within-subjects group experimental design was used to test whether three manipulated characteristics of multiple baseline across participants (MBL-P) data showing at least a month delayed change in slope affected experts' inference of a functional relation and agreement on this judgment. Thirty-six experts completed a survey composed of 16 MBL-P…

One tool for enhancing students' work with data in the science classroom is the measure line. As a coteacher and curriculum developer for The Inquiry Project, the author has seen how measure lines--a number line in which the numbers refer to units of measure--help students not only represent data but also analyze it in ways that generate…

This study extends previous research that explores how visualization affordances that computational tools provide and social network analyses that account for individual- and group-level dynamic processes can work in conjunction to improve learning outcomes. The study's main hypothesis is that when social network graphs are used in instruction,…

Combinatorial scientific computing plays an important enabling role in computational science, particularly in high performance scientific computing. In this thesis, we will describe our work on optimizing matrix-vector multiplication using combinatorial techniques. Our research has focused on two different problems in combinatorial scientific…

The present study was implemented as a prelude to a study on the generalization of the single variable function concept to multivariate calculus. In the present study we analyze students' mental processes and adjustments, as they are being exposed to single variable calculus with polar coordinates. The results show that there appears to be a…