This report provides advice to policymakers and school leaders on the use of assessment centres as part of a teacher selection approach. It discusses the relationship between assessment centre scores prior to joining teaching, and teacher effectiveness over a six-year period. It draws from various stages of a wider research project, the overall…

It is crucial nowadays to predict in a fast and simple manner physical-chemical behaviors like, the size-dependent optical properties of gold nanospheres (Au NSs). The idea behind this experiment is trying to replace (as much as possible) robust and expensive microscopy techniques with UV-vis spectrophotometry and friendly simulations. Students…

Over the past half century, computational chemistry has evolved from a niche field to a ubiquitous pillar of modern chemical research. Driven by the increased demand for computational chemistry in research settings, the undergraduate curriculum has evolved alongside to ensure that students are well-equipped for modern research. Toward this end,…

A glass of water covered with a disk with a hole in it can be turned upside down without spilling the water in the glass, provided the hole is small enough and the disk is pressed against the rim of the glass. A quasistatic numerical simulation based on hydrostatic pressure and surface tension of water was used calculate the critical hole diameter…

A strategy to facilitate understanding of spatial randomness is described, using student activities developed in sequence: looking at spatial patterns, simulating approximate spatial randomness using a grid of equally-likely squares, using binomial probabilities for approximations and predictions and then comparing with given Poisson…

Artificial intelligence-enabled adaptive learning systems (AI-ALS) are increasingly being deployed in education to enhance the learning needs of students. However, educational stakeholders are required by policy-makers to conduct an independent evaluation of the AI-ALS using a small sample size in a pilot study, before that AI-ALS can be approved…

Climate is a topic of great concern to students, but it remains difficult to discuss scientifically. We are bombarded daily by emotional messaging for and against the proposition that human activities are altering the climate in ways that may have catastrophic effects. But it often seems that those predictions rest entirely on massive computer…

Selecting less hazardous chemicals is a core tenet of green chemistry but is difficult to teach in practice. The upper-year undergraduate or graduate level exercise described here empowers students to make such decisions themselves. Students are tasked with finding the greenest chemical for a specific purpose described in a hypothetical scenario,…

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals ("if") and disjunctions ("or"), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic…

This teaching brief describes a three-echelon supply chain simulation that involves complex decision making in a dynamic environment. Using a team-based logistics simulation operating on a live commercial-software application (SAP ERP) as a foundation, a supplemental exercise is proposed for deeper learning of transportation and logistics aspects…

Computer science (CS) and computational thinking (a problem-solving process used by computer scientists) teach students design, logical reasoning, and problem solving--skills that are valuable in life and in any career. Computational thinking (CT) concepts such as decomposition teach students how to break down and tackle a large complex problem.…

Within the classroom it is often difficult to convey the complexities and intricacies that go into making sales and operations planning decisions. This article describes an in-class simulation that allows students to gain hands-on experience with the complexities in making forecasting, inventory, and supplier selection decisions as part of the…

Many preschool classrooms explore plant growth. However, because many plants take a long time to grow, it is often hard to facilitate engagement in some practices (i.e., since change is typically not observable from one day to another, children often forget their prior predictions or cannot recall what plants looked like days or weeks earlier).…

In this paper we show an example of how to use a computational simulation to obtain visual feedback for students' mental models, and compare their predictions with the simulated system's behaviour. Additionally, we use the computational simulation to incrementally modify the students' mental models in order to accommodate new data,…

Tossing a fair coin 1000 times can have an unexpected result. In the activities presented here, players keep track of the accumulated total for heads and tails after each toss, noting which player is in the lead or whether the players are tied. The winner is the player who was in the lead for the higher number of turns over the course of the game.…