The spotter test is an assessment that has been used widely to test practical knowledge of anatomy. Traditional spotter formats often focus solely on knowledge recall, in addition to being an onerous marking burden on staff where consistency in marking free text responses can be questioned. First-year optometry students at the University of…

The author argues that there is still too much teaching to the test, and the consequence is growing "constellations" of problem-based learning (PBL), some of which are useful, and some of which are not. Today, what passes for PBL practice often seems more like guidelines than any kind of reasoned pedagogy. While at one level the range of…

This present study investigated engineering students' conceptions and misconceptions related to derivative, particularly interpreting the graph of a function and constructing its derivative graph. Participants were 147 first year engineering students from four universities enrolled in first year undergraduate calculus courses with or without the…

This paper further develops an instructional method called here "process-object linking and embedding". The idea is to link the familiar mathematical processes to objects in a familiar situation, then re-embed the new link through mathematical symbols into their mathematical construction. It makes use of children's extra-mathematical,…