The logistic differential equation is ubiquitous in calculus and differential equations textbooks. If the model is developed from first principles in these courses, it is usually done in an abstract mathematical way, rather than in one based in ecology. In this short note, we look at examples of how the model is derived in mathematical texts and…

Nowadays, it is essential to promote an interdisciplinary approach in classrooms, integrating disciplines such as biology and mathematics. This necessitates familiarity with specific problem-solving practices employed by the expert community, such as mathematical modelling. This perspective piece explores a mathematical modelling practice to…

Problem solving in chemical kinetics poses substantial challenges for university students since it often involves significant use of mathematics as a tool and language, with challenging translations and transitions between chemical phenomena and mathematical representations. In this paper, we present key findings from a study investigating…

This study aimed to explore preservice elementary teachers' use of a bar model as a heuristic for conceptualising relationships between quantities in situations involving ratio and percentages. As a part of a larger project, we focused on two preservice teachers, Maia and Jane, and investigated their solution paths in ratio and percentage problems…

This article considers starting with an existing SIMIODE modeling scenario [Winkel, B. (2015). 1-031-CoolIt-ModelingScenario. SIMIODE (Version 2.0). "QUBES Educational Resources." https://doi.org/10.25334/3WG8-EC31] that develops Newton's law of cooling by considering data on the cooling of a beaker of water in a room, and expanding upon…

Modelling roles of mathematics in physics has proved to be a difficult task, with previous models of the interplay between the two disciplines mainly focusing on mathematical modelling and problem solving. However, to convey a realistic view of physics as a field of science to our students, we need to do more than train them to become fluent in…

Based on expectancy-value theory, this study adopted a person-centred approach to explore the heterogeneous profiles of secondary German and Taiwanese students' mathematical modelling task values, and examined the differences in their mathematical modelling performance, controlling for the variable of intra-mathematical knowledge among the…

Working with approximations is a common practice in physics. This paper presents an exploratory study of student understanding of some of the elementary aspects of approximations encountered in college physics. For this purpose, a questionnaire (a set of 14 multiple-choice questions) was developed to probe how students dealt with these aspects in…

The objective of this work is to show an educational path for combinatorics and graph theory that has the aim, on one hand, of helping students understand some discrete mathematics properties, and on the other, of developing modelling skills through a robust understanding. In particular, for the path proposed to middle-school students, we used a…

This work is a segment of an ongoing doctoral research in Brazil. The Leonardo numbers and the Leonardo sequence have gained attention from mathematicians and the academic community. Despite being a relatively new sequence within mathematical literature, its discussion has intensified over the past five years, giving rise to other branches, with…

This article describes the results of an investigation based on a Models and Modeling Perspective [MMP]. We present the evolution of the models built by university students when solving a model development sequence designed to promote their learning of the exponential function. As a result, we observed that students' thinking was modified,…

When learning chemistry, students must learn to extract chemical information from mathematical expressions. However, chemistry students' exposure to mathematics often comes primarily from pure mathematics courses, which can lead to knowledge fragmentation and potentially hinder their ability to use mathematics in chemistry. This study examines how…

This study focuses on the potential of university mathematics courses to advance teachers' knowledge regarding an important component of knowledge about the nature of mathematics as a scientific discipline, namely the mutual contribution between mathematics and various fields: mathematics contributes to solving problems in different fields, and…

One can identify at least three different types of relationships between mathematics and crises. First, "mathematics can picture a crisis." This is in accordance with the classic interpretation of mathematical modelling, which highlights that a mathematical model provides a representation of a piece of reality, a reality that could be a…

It is well-known that the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model has a family of periodic orbits, but does not possess limit cycles and therefore the model is said to be structurally unstable. The Lotka-Volterra model is a special case of a much larger group namely the quadratic population models and it can be shown that none of them can produce limit…