Use the practical suggestions offered here to ease the transition when a newcomer emergent bilingual student comes to your school.

Physicists create spreadsheets customarily to carry out numerical calculations and to display their results in a meaningful, nice-looking way. Spreadsheets can also be used to display a vivid geometrical model of a physical system. This statement is illustrated with an example taken from geometrical optics: images formed by a thin lens. A careful…

This linear algebra note offers teaching and learning ideas in the treatment of the inner product space R[superscript m x n] in a technology-supported learning environment. Classroom activities proposed in this note demonstrate creative ways of integrating MATLAB technology into various properties of Frobenius inner product as visualization tools…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OER) are rapidly growing, but are not usually offered in multiple languages due to the lack of cost-effective solutions to translate the different objects comprising them and particularly videos. However, current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine…

Puzzle pieces have become ubiquitous symbols for autism. However, puzzle-piece imagery stirs debate between those who support and those who object to its use because they believe puzzle-piece imagery evokes negative associations. Our study empirically investigated whether puzzle pieces evoke negative associations in the general public.…

The National Research Council's Framework for K-12 Science Education articulates the need to shift science curricula from being a collection of discrete facts to curricula that integrate core ideas and practices. To help teachers better integrate content and to respond to expressed frustration regarding extensive lists of standards often presented…

In this review essay I respond to issues raised in Mijung Kim and Wolff-Michael Roth's paper titled "Dialogical argumentation in elementary science classrooms", which presents a study dealing with dialogical argumentation in early elementary school classrooms. Since there is very limited research on lower primary school students'…

People are inundated with visual information. In this study, I address the question: "When preservice elementary teacher candidates include visuals and graphics into social studies lessons, in what ways do they integrate these materials?" As part of a social studies methods course, participants created lesson plans. These plans included…

Drawing equipotential and electric field lines is an activity commonly found in most second-semester introductory physics courses. Unfortunately, current commercial lab offerings are expensive and do not afford the opportunity for real-time graphical visualization of the trends in voltage in different regions. In this brief article, we describe a…

The First Impressions program was designed to help communities learn about their strengths and shortcomings through the "fresh eyes" of first-time visitors. This Extension-led community assessment program has been implemented in over 500 communities since the 1990s, yet scant literature exists regarding the program's theoretical…

Maps are present in flags as part of their design and are more common in subnational flags. This study analyzed 4,804 subnational flags in North America -- the continent with the most flags with maps -- to identify if maps are incorporated, the area the maps represented and the presence of the theme of location. The theme of location is one of the…

It would be safe to say that nearly every student enrolled in college knows someone who has been impacted by cancer. After all, cancer killed nearly 8.2 million people worldwide in 2012 (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2014). Using this fact as the impetus for change, we decided to make cancer the focus of a…

A class diagram is one of the most important diagrams of Unified Modeling Language (UML) and can be used for modeling the static structure of a software system. Learning from errors is a teaching approach based on the assumption that errors can promote learning. We applied a constructive approach of using errors in designing a UML class diagram in…

Research has demonstrated that students' learning outcomes and motivation to learn are influenced by the visual design of learning technologies (e.g., learning management systems or LMS). One aspect of LMS design that has not been thoroughly investigated is visual complexity. In two experiments, postsecondary students rated the visual complexity…

Children see and describe patterns in the primary grades when they develop the meaning of numbers by composing and decomposing. During their early years, they use patterns to learn properties of operations (Common Core Standards Writing Team 2011). While describing the intent of the third-grade standards for multiplication, the CCSS writers…