In this exercise, participants create a fictional business based on a set of randomly generated words. This challenge requires participants to exercise creativity, while reinforcing the business concepts learned in class. The exercise has four steps: (1) generating a prompt of three random words, (2) designing a fictional business based on this…

In this article we focus on the co-creation of ideas. Through the use of concepts from collaborative learning and communication theory we suggest a model that will enable the cooperative nature of creative design tasks to emerge. Four objectives of the model are stated and elaborated on in the paper: that the model should be anchored in previous…

To fulfill the Standards for Mathematical Practice (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA Center & CCSSO], 2010), it is important for teachers to empower students to critique, revise, and expand their ideas as they solve problems. However, students often face challenges such…

Children learn to find answers when multiplying two whole numbers (e.g., 3 × 7 = 21). To this end, they may repeatedly add one number (e.g., 7 + 7 + 7 = 21). But what meanings do they have for multiplication? The authors address this issue while sharing an innovative, playful task called Please Go and Bring for Me (PGBM). Drawing on the…

Mathematical paradoxes often produce awe and wonder in the mathematics classroom. In this classroom episode, I share a paradoxical task, based on Simpson's Paradox, and its power as an intervention for a child diagnosed with ADHD. The Paradox leveraged his strengths to help him build understandings in proportional reasoning.

"We might view the movement from teacher-directed to student-driven learning as a set of controls, much like the controls on an audio sound board," write Bena Kallick and Allison Zmuda. For each element of personalization, the teacher can turn the volume up or down, amplifying or reducing the amount of student agency depending on the…

The ideas students bring to class and their perspectives on what is happening in the classroom change constantly. Keeping track of these changes is useful for adapting lessons, nurturing student self-reflection, increasing student ownership of learning, and building a teaching practice responsive to learners' needs. In this article, the authors…

Jeremy Thomas and Russell McBride are social studies teachers in North Carolina and, until recently, were colleagues at a charter school outside of Raleigh, serving students in grades 6-12. After learning about the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), both teachers implemented it into their classrooms and immediately saw how the blueprint helped deepen…

Tzur and Simon (2004) postulated two stages of concept development, participatory and anticipatory. The distinction between the two stages was exemplified by what they termed "the next-day phenomenon" in which learners who could solve a task one day in the context of the activity through which they made the abstraction, could not solve…

In this article, the author describes an innovative approach for conceptualizing and managing career development tasks in the 21st century. Theoretical foundations and key concepts related to career flow theory are discussed.

This article describes concepts exhibited by seventh-grade prealgebra students as they approached algebraic-thinking tasks. (Contains 7 Figures.)

A review of the literature reveals that obstacles to the successful transfer of basic skills, knowledge, and thinking skills during classroom instructional time differ depending on which of three components of expertise is entailed: conceptual understanding, domain-specific basic skills, or domain-specific strategies. This article, accordingly,…

This research introduces a new naive physics belief, the Galileo bias, whereby people ignore air resistance and falsely believe that all objects fall at the same rate. Survey results revealed that this bias is held by many and is surprisingly strongest for those with formal physics instruction. In 2 experiments, 98 participants dropped ball pairs…

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli…

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization.…