Citizens need the capability to conduct their own inquiry projects so that they can make sense of claims about new energy policies, health remedies, or financial opportunities. To develop the lifelong capability to grapple with these dilemmas, we report on ways to design precollege units that engage students in realistic, personally relevant…

Undergraduate students' written exams were analyzed from a freshman-level mathematics course that emphasized, among other topics, the study of mathematical logic. Findings indicate that on questions related to the negation of a conditional sentence, students performed much better when given natural-language contexts than they did on questions…