Public schools, colleges, and universities all strive to prepare students for the workforce or further education through career development activities and career education. Research shows many high school students have had insufficient exposure to and have inadequate information about career related tasks and duties. Studies also show that many…

Across the country, districts are committing to observing, assessing, and giving feedback to teachers multiple times a year. Currently, school systems are dedicating an enormous amount of effort to accumulating data on teachers, but the field still has a lot to learn about how best to use data to support the improvement of teaching. This brief,…

While professional developers have been encouraging teachers to plan for discourse around problem solving tasks as a way to orchestrate mathematically productive discourse (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008; Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, 2009) no research has been conducted explicitly examining the relationship between the plans…

The need for more engineers equipped with new skill sets is essential for ensuring our national security, climate sustainability, and maintaining our position as a global leader in innovation and as an economic world power. The design challenges engineers face increasingly require a human-centered, creative, practical, and systems-based approach…

This paper begins with an analysis of global problems shaping education, particularly as they impact upon learning and life chances. In addressing these problems a range of philosophical positions and controversies are considered, including: traditional romantic and institutional views of schooling; and more recent maximalist, neo-liberal,…

The study investigated the effects of non-segmented multimedia worked examples (NS-MWE), segmented multimedia worked examples (S-MWE), and segmented multimedia worked examples enhanced with self-explanation prompts (S-MWE-SE) on acquisition of conceptual knowledge and problem solving performance in an undergraduate engineering course. In addition,…

The Catseye Marble company tests the strength of its marbles by dropping them from various levels of their office tower, to find the highest floor from which a marble will not break. We find the smallest number of drops required and from which floor each drop should be made. We also find out how these answers change if a restriction is placed on…

"The World Is Flat" (Friedman 2005) describes the globalization that advances in technology have imposed on the world economy in recent decades. For the U.S. to maintain its stature in the world, future citizens must be prepared to problem solve and apply their skills to new situations. These future citizens are sitting in elementary school…

In this study, we sought to determine whether psychosocial development and self-efficacy of major changers differ from those classified as relatively stable. Participants completed the "Life-Skills Inventory-College" (Picklesimer, 1991) form to measure psychosocial development and the "General Self-efficacy" (Schwarzer &…

Many familiar household objects (such as sausages) involve the maximization of a volume under geometric constraints. A flexible but inextensible membrane bounds a volume which is to be filled to capacity. In the case of the sausage, a full analytic solution is here provided. Other related but more difficult problems seem to demand approximate…

The purpose of this paper is to promote the understanding of how employees learn to use information and communication technology (ICT) systems at work. The elements of a learning activity in the context of ICT use are identified from the literature. In particular, approaches to learning, learning strategies and problem-solving strategies are…

Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments,…

Viviani's theorem states that the sum of distances from any point inside an equilateral triangle to its sides is constant. Here, in an extension of this result, we show, using linear programming, that any convex polygon can be divided into parallel line segments on which the sum of the distances to the sides of the polygon is constant. Let us say…

Investigations of the problem types used in college-level general chemistry examinations have been reported in this Journal and were first reported in the "Journal of Chemical Education" in 1924. This study extends the findings from general chemistry to the problems of four college-level organic chemistry courses. Three problem…

How do children use questions as tools to acquire new knowledge? The current experiment examined preschool children's ability to direct questions to appropriate sources to acquire knowledge. Fifty preschoolers engaged in a task that entailed asking questions to discover which special key would open a box that contained a prize. Children solved…