Adults use social-group membership to make inductive inferences about the properties of novel individuals, and this tendency is well established by the preschool years. Recent evidence suggests that infants attend to features associated with social groups and use social-group membership to interpret an agents' actions. The current study sought to…

The idea of "threshold concepts" has been used to identify discipline-based concepts that are critical to that academic area. Threshold concepts are often difficult for students to assimilate in a meaningful way but, once done, can be powerful for the learner. In general, threshold concepts are 1) transformative to learner thinking; 2)…

Environmental forensics is the application of knowledge from geosciences and chemistry in a legal setting, e.g., to determine the origin and consequences of contamination events. Teaching environmental forensics requires reactivating prior knowledge from different fields of natural sciences, filling knowledge gaps, and connecting pieces of…

The divide between those who do and those who do not excel in mathematics is patterned in problematic ways. Women and people of color are typically underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and other quantitative fields (ex. Finance) where mathematics plays gatekeeper. However, mathematics is not a subject these groups…

This article reports on a multiple-case study of how six educational alliances developed Integrated Logic Models, a new tool that integrates components of multiple programs into a single logic model template to link equity research, practice, and evaluation. These alliances used three related strategies: choosing theories and research that point…

This report summarizes the findings across two case studies conducted as part of WestEd's evaluation of the California Statewide Early Math Initiative (CAEMI). The case studies aimed to understand the planning and implementation of professional learning and coaching in local communities. They also examined changes in educators' math knowledge,…

Recent policy reports and standards documents advocate for science teachers to adopt more student-centered instructional practices. Four secondary science teachers from one school district participated in a semester-long video club focused on honing attention to students' evidence-based reasoning and creating opportunities to make students'…

Results from a study of 16 community college students are presented. The research question concerned how students reasoned about p-values. Students' approach to p-values in hypothesis testing was procedural. Students viewed p-values as something that one compares to alpha values in order to arrive at an answer and did not attach much meaning to…

As part of an ongoing project to examine student learning in upper-division courses in thermal and statistical physics, we have examined student reasoning about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We have examined reasoning in terms of heat transfer, entropy maximization, and statistical treatments of multiplicity and probability. In…

Clinical reasoning requires thoughtful consideration of a variety of factors that contribute to the conceptualization of a case such as the reason for referral, school information, home environment, assessment outcomes, and behavioural observations made during assessments. The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with insight into the…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

The Dynabook research project was a collaborative effort aimed at developing and evaluating a new interactive Web-based resource for use in teacher education to improve how teachers learn to teach middle-school mathematics. This paper describes the outcomes of research during a three-year project to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of the…

In a prior issue of "MathAMATYC Educator," we reported on our efforts to find out what community college developmental mathematics students understand about mathematics (Stigler, Givvin, & Thompson, 2010). Our work painted a distressing picture of students' mathematical knowledge. No matter what kind of mathematical question we…

"OperationARIES!" is an Intelligent Tutoring System that teaches scientific inquiry skills in a game-like atmosphere. Students complete three different training modules, each with natural language conversations, in order to acquire deep-level knowledge of 21 core concepts of research methodology (e.g., correlation does not mean…

We present an innovative course-based undergraduate research experience curriculum focused on the characterization of single point mutations in p53, a tumor suppressor gene that is mutated in more than 50% of human cancers. This course is required of all introductory biology students, so all biology majors engage in a research project as part of…