This is a methodological critique of research by the Best Practice in Grouping Students (BPGS) project claiming teacher bias in allocating students to first-year secondary school mathematics teaching sets ("British Educational Research Journal," 45(4), 873-897 [EJ1223692]). The research assumes that bias could be shown by non-random…

This article is a commentary for the special issue on affect and mathematics in young children, written from the perspective of research on affect in mathematics education. The studies in this special issue focus on the individual learners' affective traits and use primarily surveys as the method. The most common type of affect is emotions, but…

We present a comment on "Benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory electricity and magnetism course", by F. J. Kontur, K. de La Harpe, and N. B. Terry PRST-PER 11, 010105 (2015). Our data show that the conclusions Kontur and coworkers draw from their data may not be generally applicable.

To an unreconstructed cognitivist with experience of developing General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations and national tests in mathematics, the three papers which provide the core of this special issue (Morgan & Sfard; Morgan, Morgan & Tang) provided a refreshing opportunity to consider examination items from a…

This webinar explored how the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provide an instructional framework to support professional growth and inform teacher evaluation systems for science instruction. This Q&A addressed the questions participants had for Dr. Wilson and Jody Bintz following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…

In Miyamoto et al. (2015, this issue) the authors looked to substantiate the presence of the spacing effect, referenced from the psychology literature, in several MOOCs. Their secondary analyses constituted a robust, empirical finding on the correspondence between session distribution and certification but with only a coarse, analogous…

This article reports an interview with Michael Byram, Professor Emeritus, University of Durham in the United Kingdom, during his visit to Argentina in September 2011. Michael Byram is one of the main international referents in intercultural education. The interview addresses issues such as language education, intercultural and citizenship…

Subtractive education through the medium of a dominant language often transfers Indigenous and minority (IM) children to the dominant group linguistically and culturally within one or two generations. It may lead to the extinction of Indigenous languages, thus contributing to the disappearance of the world's linguistic diversity. A partial result…

Intertextuality is a vital component of college reading and writing. In order to write a paper that requires the synthesizing of readings, students must recognize the intertextual connections among all their sources. Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they…

Parallels between martial arts and mathematics are explored. Misguided public perception of both disciplines, students' misconceptions, and the similarities between proofs and katas are among the striking commonalities between martial arts and mathematics. The author also reflects on what he has learned in his martial arts training, and how this…

This article interrogates the notion of "glocalization" (Moja, 2004, based on Castells, 2001) as a concept that seeks to integrate the local and the global to address both the need for social justice and the need to participate in a global market economy. The article argues that the relation between the global and the local cannot be…

There is a wealth of literature examining the role of motivation in second language (L2) learning but remarkably little research that has examined how teachers can foster motivation in the classroom. For this reason alone Guilloteaux and Dornyei's (2008) correlational study of the relationship between motivational strategies and student motivation…

This article presents the authors' reply to Rod Ellis's comments on their study on motivated classroom behavior. As Ellis correctly summarizes, the three student variables selected for investigation in the authors' study were attention, participation, and volunteering for teacher-fronted activity. These three components were then summed up in a…

Presents an evaluation of "Smithtown," an intelligent tutoring system designed to teach inductive inquiry skills and principles of basic microeconomics. Two studies of individual differences in learning are described, including a comparison of knowledge acquisition with traditional instruction; hypotheses tested are discussed; and the…

Considers the nature and extent of bias toward experimentation and against correlational studies. Argues for the use of correlational studies and describes a field-tested approach to enabling students to direct open-ended investigations of this type. (45 references) (JRH)