The overall aim of this article is to stimulate discussion about the activities within CER, and to develop a more thoughtful and explicit perspective on the different types of research activity within CER, and their relationships with each other. While theories may be the most valuable outputs of research to those wishing to apply them, for…

Online discussion forums are highly valued by instructors due to their affordance for understanding class activities and learning. However, a discussion forum with a great number of posts requires a large amount of time to view, and help requests are easily overlooked. Various machine-learning--based tools have been developed to help instructors…

It is still surprisingly common to hear advocates of Catholic education refer to 'Catholic' Religious Education. This article will identify the issues bound up with the concept of 'Catholic Religious Education'. It will be argued that at the very least using this concept is akin to a category mistake, and at worst it skews our understanding of…

Despite receiving scant attention, the evolution of categorization in early childhood is of central importance, not only in clarifying the child's understanding of the world but in terms of refining cognitive organization and augmenting the development of semantic memory. In this review, we outline how categorization develops and is made manifest…

This article provides computational and rule-based approaches for detecting confusion that is expressed in students' comments in couse forums. To obtain reliable, ground truth data about which posts exhibit student confusion, we designed a decision tree that facilitates the manual labeling of forum posts by experts. However, manual labeling is…

The four representative models that define oxidation-reduction reactions are often used differently in different situations or contexts in chemistry textbooks. Although integrated models have been suggested to overcome the confusion caused by this, they have not been successful. We therefore aim to interpret the causes for difficulties in the…

To learn why natural selection acts only on existing variation, students categorize processes as either creative or sorting. This activity helps students confront the misconception that adaptations evolve because species need them.

Mairead Hourigan and Aisling Leavy describe a range of teaching and learning activities focusing on the identification and classification of 2-dimensional shapes. The activities described are useful in highlighting students' misconceptions regarding non-traditioanl and non-prototypical shapes.

In online educational systems we can easily collect and analyze extensive data about student learning. Current practice, however, focuses only on some aspects of these data, particularly on correctness of students answers. When a student answers incorrectly, the submitted wrong answer can give us valuable information. We provide an overview of…

Greece conjures up images of idyllic island landscapes, turquoise seas and venerable mythic deeds set among majestic monuments. These notions are, moreover, often associated with a history, religious culture and language that are ancient. Tourist posters and national sentiment aside, today the Hellenic Republic is a country that is as much…

When high school seniors begin searching for the best school to fit their higher education goals, they may need a road map, tour guide and interpreter to help them sort through Pennsylvania's higher education universe. For sure there are seemingly endless choices--public, private, large, small, urban and rural. The Keystone State boasts nearly 200…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

Because some teachers and the leaders as well as many sports theorists have some conceptual misunderstanding of competitive sports conducted by school, there're some differences of opinions about competitive sports in physical education field, it would have a negative effect on the development of competitive sports in school. This essay is mainly…

Computer-Aided Assessments (CAAs) have been used increasingly at Brunel University for over 10 years to test students' mathematical abilities. Recently, we have focussed on providing very rich feedback to the students; given the work involved in designing and coding such feedback, it is important to study the impact of the interaction between…

Within the historical context of the development of chemistry, Avogadro's hypothesis represents a fundamental concept: It allowed Avogadro to explain Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes and it allowed Cannizzaro to establish a more accurate set of atomic mass values. If students are going to understand the concept of relative atomic masses and…