Students are an important stakeholder group in the context of quality assurance in higher education. From their perspective as learners, students' views on educational experiences are increasingly used as an indicator of educational quality. The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) is a widely used quantitative tool to gauge students' perceptions…

The goal of this paper is to promote computational thinking among mathematics, engineering, science and technology students, through hands-on computer experiments. These activities have the potential to empower students to learn, create and invent with technology, and they engage computational thinking through simulations, visualizations and data…

Demonstrating probabilistic outcomes using real-time data is especially well-suited to larger lecture classes where one can generate large data sets easily. The difficulty comes in quickly collecting, analyzing, and displaying the information. With the advent of wireless polling technology (clickers), this difficulty is removed. In this paper we…

A Graphing Calculator (GC) is one of the most portable and affordable technology in mathematics education. It quickens the mechanical procedure in solving mathematical problems and creates a highly interactive learning environment, which makes learning a seemingly difficult subject, easy. Since research on the use of GCs for the teaching and…

A challenging problem in some developing countries such as Nigeria is inadequate training of students in effective problem solving using the core concepts of their disciplines. Related to this is a disconnection between their learning and socio-economic development agenda of a country. These problems are more vivid in statistical education which…

Genetics is a unifying theme of biology that poses a major challenge for students across a wide range of post-secondary institutions, because it entails complex problem solving. This article reports a new intelligent learning environment called the Genetics Cognitive Tutor, which supports genetics problem solving. The tutor presents complex,…

Certain learners are less sensitive to learning environments and can always learn, while others are more sensitive to variations in learning environments and may fail to learn (Cronbach & Snow, 1977). We refer to the former as high learners and the latter as low learners. One important goal of any learning environment is to bring students up…

In building intelligent tutoring systems, it is critical to be able to understand and diagnose student responses in interactive problem solving. However, building this understanding into a computer-based intelligent tutor is a time-intensive process usually conducted by subject experts. Much of this time is spent in building production rules that…

Two mathematical brainteasers, with solutions depending on involved trial-and-error processes, are shown to have ingenious solutions. (MP)

Examples are given of problems which can be solved pictorially, thus aiding in the general development of geometric intuition and in developing some of the basic ideas of probability. (MP)

Examined the problem-solving performances of novices (11 undergraduates) and experts (9 graduate students and instructors), comparing them in terms of background expertise and problem-solving success. Also examined problem-solving behaviors reported in other domains and determined whether or not genetics is a fruitful area for problem-solving…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether students had knowledge of the extension rule (the conjunction of two or more events cannot be greater than the probability of any one of those events) and understanding of conjunction by giving a test of multiplicative probabilities. Involved were 598 students enrolled in introductory psychology…

Protocols were obtained from 22 subjects as they discovered the conditions under which equilibrium is obtained on a balance beam by predicting and observing the outcomes of a series of problems. The interviews revealed that subjects used a variety of heuristics to make predictions once they had isolated the two relevant features of the problem,…

A problem illustrating how physics and mathematics complement one another when analyzing problems of the physical world is described. (JT)

Advantages and disadvantages of common ways to justify the answer to a probability problem are discussed. One explanation appears superior to the others because it is easy to understand, mathematically rigorous, generalizes to a broader class of problems, and avoids the deficiencies of the other explanations. (MNS)