This paper introduces the reader to the "Periodic Table of the World's Religious and Philosophical Traditions" (PTWRPT). It summarizes its background history, the conceptual thinking that underlies it, and explains why and how it was created. Using the same thinking that underlies Mendeleyev's Periodic Table of the Elements, it sets out…

In 2013, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), working collaboratively with state education agencies, released a set of criteria for states to use to evaluate and procure high-quality assessments. The mathematics section of the document included five content-specific criteria to evaluate alignment of assessments to college- and…

In the later years of undergraduate study, students read, process, and evaluate primary literature within specific fields of study. Shifting from textbooks to the vast amounts of peer-reviewed current literature can be difficult for students. This article details an innovative approach to helping students successfully make this transition through…

Online testing is a popular practice for tertiary educators, largely owing to efficiency in automation, scalability, and capability to add depth and breadth to subject offerings. As with all assessments, designs need to consider whether student cheating may be inadvertently made easier and more difficult to detect. Cheating can jeopardise the…

The authors who are mathematics teacher educators, have found that classifying, composing, and transforming shapes (in particular, rotations and reflections) are areas of difficulty for adults as well as for children. However, these are also some of the most important geometric ideas. They are fundamental topics in the K-8 Geometry and Measurement…

Recognising students' emotion, affect or cognition is a relatively young field and still a challenging task in the area of intelligent tutoring systems. There are several ways to use the output of these recognition tasks within the system. The approach most often mentioned in the literature is using it for giving feedback to the students. The…

Students are put in the role of a manager who watches inventory levels decrease and must order at the right time and in the right quantity to minimize costs. This interactive game requires the students to race against time and has levels of increasing difficulty. It introduces the students to the concepts of holding cost, ordering cost, backlog…

The concept of TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context) was created by Belle Wallace (Wallace et al., 1993) as a model that can be used to nurture and develop thinking skills. As children work through the TASC wheel, the teacher has a very good opportunity to facilitate explicit conversations about thinking. This allows the children to grow in…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

In assessment, the ability to construct test items that measure a targeted skill is fundamental to validity and alignment. The ability to do the reverse is also important: determining what skill an existing test item measures. This paper presents a model for classifying test items that builds on procedures developed by others, including Bloom…

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) proposition 3 states "teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning." They know how "...to organize instruction to meet instructional goals." This article provides 14 organizational patterns for use in organizing instruction in any of the content areas. The 14…

In this paper we describe a taxonomy of task demands which distinguishes between Task Complexity, Task Condition and Task Difficulty. We then describe three theoretical claims and predictions of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001, 2003b, 2005a) concerning the effects of task complexity on: (a) language production; (b) interaction and uptake…

The Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) promotes standards to enhance opportunities for student learning and development from higher education programs and services. Responding to the increased shift in attention being paid by educators and their stakeholders from higher education inputs (i.e., standards and…

To determine whether consensus existed among teachers about the complexity of common classroom materials, a survey was administered to 66 pre-service and in-service kindergarten and prekindergarten teachers. Participants were asked to rate 14 common classroom materials as simple, complex, or super-complex. Simple materials have one obvious part,…

Argues that three tenets of the traditional wisdom about teacher questioning are based on inadequate research: (1) it is useful to classify questions as fact (lower level) or reason (higher level); (2) higher level questions are better; and (3) questions are good in general because they stimulate thought. (MBR)