A semester-long laboratory course was designed and implemented to familiarize students with modern biochemistry and molecular biology techniques. The designed format involved active student participation, evaluation of data, and critical thinking, and guided students to become independent researchers. The first part of the course focused on…

Students are seldom given an authentic experience within school that allows them the opportunity to solve real-life complex engineering design problems that have meaning to their lives and/ or the greater society. They are often confined to learning environments that are limited by the restrictions set by course content for assessment purposes and…

A school that holds as a central belief that knowledge is individually and socially constructed by learners who are active observers of the world, active questioners, agile problem posers and critical and creative problem solvers must evolve leadership models and organizational patterns that mirror this model of genuine and meaningful learning as…

Many teachers have designed lessons for students who will be working in groups to discuss and solve a problem. After investing time in constructing an interesting problem, creating strategically designed groups, and introducing the problem carefully, teachers may be left wondering how to help students collaborate to make sense of mathematical…

In this article the authors explain that when engaging in a problem-solving conversation with a child, their goal goes beyond helping the child reach a correct answer. They want to learn about the child's mathematical thinking, support that thinking, and extend it as far as possible. This exploration of children's thinking is central to…

Destination Imagination is a creative problem solving competition for school-aged children that encourages creative growth and long-term problem solving skills. These skills are important for young children as they can be directly related to future success in school, home, and the workplace. This extracurricular activity has impacted 1.5 million…

This executive summary highlights findings from a larger study that is part of an interrelated series of studies included in the Ready To Learn summative evaluation being conducted by the Education Development Center, Inc.'s (EDC's) Center for Children and Technology and SRI Education's Center for Technology in Learning (EDC/SRI). The purpose of…

Studying physics for nonphysics majors at college level is usually a process of learning new problem-solving skills and sometimes seems a frustrating experience. In an attempt to provide students with more learning resources, online homework was required to supplement the instruction. This study reveals the role of the online homework assignments…

This paper tells the story of what happened when students in the authors' sophomore-level introduction-to-proof classes were given a theorem to prove with no expectation about what proof method to use. The paper discusses the nine different student-produced proofs of the statement: If "n" is an integer such that "n" is greater than or equal to 3,…

Science is the study of nature's rules. The most basic of these are the laws of physics, most of which are expressed in equation form. Physics equations show how concepts connect to one another. But does a study of these equations enhance student understanding? Not always, for too often in an introductory course students are tempted (or even…

In this paper, we describe a one-day professional development activity for mathematics teachers that promoted the use of comparison as an instructional tool to develop students' flexibility in algebra. Effective use of comparison in mathematics instruction involves using side-by-side presentation of problems and solution methods and subsequent…

In an age of uncertainty, one of the aims of higher education is to establish lifelong learning abilities in students. However, different authors remain divided on the question of what constitutes "lifelong learning ability". This article proposes the hypothesis that the cultivation of lifelong learning abilities in higher education needs to be…

Mathematics is a creative process, and unfortunately, that process is often hidden from students of the discipline. This is certainly the case in the area of mathematics commonly referred to as abstract algebra. Current pedagogy conceals from the student many of the great ideas generated by significant problems in the history of the discipline. In…

The aim of this article is to establish some interesting inequalities involving arithmetic functions.

The standard approach to the general rules for differentiation is to first derive the power, product, and quotient rules and then derive the chain rule. In this short article we give an approach to these rules which uses the chain rule as the main tool in deriving the power, product, and quotient rules in a manner which is more student-friendly…