How can teachers encourage productive struggle in mathematics and yet minimize the exposure to shame often associated with struggle? In this article, the authors offer constructive ways to position struggle in the classroom to minimize shame and promote doers of mathematics.

A successful flipped classroom relies heavily on student engagement in pre-class learning and their active participation in classroom activities. However, much to students' disappointment, their efforts in the learning process often go unnoticed in traditional assessment approaches (such as term papers and final examinations) that are more…

Parental involvement in learning, entertainment, emotion, and daily care is crucial to the growth and development of children. Due to the increasing significance of educational attainment in China, parental involvement in child learning is receiving ever-increasing weight and is now the most prevalent of the four aspects. In the wake of the…

When "software takes command", people take fright -- a reaction which frequently accompanies change or novelty. Their fears are understandable, but they also cloud people's view of the potentials that digital tools and digital media hold for society and especially educational contexts. Their fears also define societal debates and…

This paper describes a new approach for learning from homework called Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR). PAR involves students using peer feedback to improve their work on open-ended homework problems. Collaborating with peers and revising one's work based on the feedback of others are important aspects of doing and learning physics. While notable…

Learning curves have proven to be a useful tool for understanding how a student learns a given skill as they progress through a curriculum. A learning curve for a given Knowledge Component (KC) is a plot of some measure of competence as a function of the number of opportunities the student has had to apply that KC. Consider the case where each…

This paper discusses my experiences taking a semester's worth of undergraduate courses in order to determine the literacy task demands placed on students in the classroom. It has been well documented that students struggle with literacy tasks when they enter college. My experiences indicated that part of this struggle might be because reading…

The importance of metacognition in the process of learning is an old idea that can be traced from Socrates' questioning methods to Dewey's twentieth-century stance that one learns more from reflecting on one's experiences than from the actual experiences themselves (Dewey, 1933). What is more recent is the coining of the term "metacognition" and…

In this paper we describe an instructional tactic of individually assigned homework that promotes and strengthens individual learning processes. We claim that current emphasis on the benefits of collaborative learning belittles the importance of individual learning processes and reduces the opportunities to require and assess individual learning…

Students entering Steve Speier's Spanish class pull their personal laptops from their packs and begin preparing for the lesson. Some review Speier's board notes containing a combination of typed phrases and dozens of handdrawn vocabulary words saved as PDF files from his interactive white board Notebook program. Others don headphones and listen to…