Most educational developers can tell a story of a moment when they stood in the breach between their enthusiasm for an educational concept and their ability to communicate that concept in a way that seemed meaningful to a colleague whose expertise was in a field other than teaching and learning. These are defining moments in articulating the heart…

Differential equations (DEs) are important in mathematics as well as in science and the social sciences. Thus, the study of DEs has been included in various courses in different departments in higher education. The importance of DEs has attracted the attention of many researchers who have generally focussed on the content and instruction of DEs.…

This research examined the role of mothers' mindsets about the malleability of children's ability in the quality of their involvement in children's learning. Mothers (N = 79) of early elementary school children (mean age = 7.65 years) were induced to hold either an entity mindset, in which children's ability is seen as unchangeable, or an…

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM's) (2000) Connections Standard states that students should "recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas; understand how mathematical ideas interconnect ...; [and] recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics" (p. 354). This article presents an in-depth…

Silently, invisibly, ceaselessly, our planet Earth is showered by radio waves from every direction and from every region of space. This radio energy originates in our solar system, throughout the Milky Way galaxy, and far beyond, out to the remotest reaches of the universe. Detecting and unraveling the origins of these invisible signals is what…

The relationship between coping strategies used by South Asian American women and subjective well-being (SWB) was studied. Second-generation women were found to use more support compared with 1st-generation women. Problem-solving coping was inversely related to age. Avoidance coping was found to predict SWB when controlling for age and…

In this article, the authors offer a framework that identifies two critical problems in designing inquiry-based instruction and suggests three models for developing instruction that overcomes those problems. The Protocol Model overcomes the Getting on Board Problem by providing students an initial experience through clearly delineated steps with a…

This study investigates how students enrolled in entry-level geology, most of whom would graduate from college without university-level physics courses, thought about and applied the concept of gravity while solving problems concerning gravity. The repercussions of students' gravity concepts are then considered in the context of non-physics…

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs), as alternative approaches to unidimensional item response models, have received increasing attention in recent years. CDMs are developed for the purpose of identifying the mastery or nonmastery of multiple fine-grained attributes or skills required for solving problems in a domain. For CDMs to receive wider use,…

When researchers use the term "mind wandering" for task-unrelated thoughts in signal detection tasks, we may fall into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. Similar negative connotations are attached to common terms like "cognitive failures", "resting state", "rumination", "distraction", "attentional…

The read-aloud accommodation (RA) is frequently provided to students with high-incidence disabilities to facilitate their access to learning opportunities during instruction and to allow them to demonstrate knowledge and skills during testing. Empirical support for this accommodation has been somewhat mixed, and has primarily focused on…

Teaching students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and learn how to communicate their understandings and learning in science. This study involved 248 students (119 boys and 129 girls) from 26 grade 6 teachers' classes in nine primary schools in Brisbane,…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics will place more pressure on special education and math teachers to raise the skill levels of all students, especially those with disabilities in math (MD). The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of enhanced anchored instruction (EAI) on students with and without MD in co-taught general…

Self-directed, inquiry-based learning opportunities focused on transdisciplinary real-world problem solving have been shown to foster creativity in learners. What tools might we provide classroom teachers to scaffold them and their students through this creative process? This study examines an online informal learning environment and the role the…

This exploratory study sheds new light on students' perceptions of online feedback types for a complex writing task, summary writing from spoken input in a foreign language (L2), and investigates how these correlate with their actual learning to write. Students tend to favour clear-cut, instructivist rather than constructivist feedback, and guided…