The "remembered success effect" (Finn, 2010) refers to the finding that challenging academic tasks that start or end with extra opportunities for success are often preferred to challenging tasks that do not include these opportunities. Research on the remembered success effect has identified some memory processes that are thought to give…

Three studies examine a novel pathway by which the perseverance component of the personality trait "grit" might predict college students' behavioral persistence when solving challenging math problems. Specifically, we focus on the intervening role of what we refer to as "math-specific self-perceptions of perseverance," which…

Not-knowing is an underexplored concept defined as an individual's ability to be aware of what they do not know to plan and effectively face complex situations. This paper focuses on analyzing students' articulation of not-knowing while completing geometric reasoning tasks. Results of this study revealed that not-knowing is a more cognitively…

In calculus courses, instructors often use the end-of-section problems in a textbook in homework assignments or other course assessments. As a result, these problems influence the teaching and learning of calculus. In this study, we examine the levels of cognitive demand of these problems in a mainstream calculus textbook and classify them within…

This study aims to analyze the correlation of the student's progress in solving a given problem with the logic of the teacher in the layout of the questions asked. The research was conducted in the government's secondary schools and colleges in the district of Abidjan and involved 453 participants, including 423 student and 30 teachers. The data…

This article presents a new measure of curricular intensity that is objective, parsimonious, clearly defined, replicable, and comparable over time for use by researchers interested in examining trends, causes, and outcomes of high school course taking. After proposing a reduced-form version of Adelman's curricular intensity index comprised of…

This study examines the impact of problem posing on developmental mathematics students. Currently, students enter post-secondary institutions underprepared for college mathematics and are required to take developmental mathematics courses. Given their past challenges with mathematics, the students tend to have negative beliefs and attitudes toward…

This study focuses on how students in different postsecondary mathematics courses perform on domain and range tasks regarding graphs of functions. Students often seem to focus on notable aspects of a graph and fail to see the graph in its entirety. Many students struggled with piecewise functions, especially those involving horizontal segments.…

The difficulties students have in blending mathematics and physics are here analyzed, by focusing on the issue of a convergent series. We present an experimental and a theoretical analysis of some phenomena which can be investigated employing series, as the bouncing marble and Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Measurements were carried…

This contribution focuses on a scheme developed to characterize the level of difficulty of an examination in the course "Linear Algebra for Engineers" and on the transfer of the underlying idea to a similar scheme for examinations in the course "Analysis I for Engineers". Using these schemes, it is possible to define standards…

Learning and teaching algebra concepts are frequent problems for both students and teachers alike. Students struggle to learn algebra, and teachers struggle to identify the best way to teach algebra. It is recurrent that teachers use instructional methods that promote memorization, and, consequently, the learning process may prove unsatisfactory.…

This study investigates university students' understanding of graphs in three different domains: mathematics, physics (kinematics), and contexts other than physics. Eight sets of parallel mathematics, physics, and other context questions about graphs were developed. A test consisting of these eight sets of questions (24 questions in all) was…

The study aims to identify areas of difficulty in learning about volumes of solids of revolution (VSOR) at a Further Education and Training college in South Africa. Students' competency is evaluated along five skill factors which refer to knowledge skills required to succeed in performing tasks relating to applications of the definite integral, in…

Traditional mathematics education focuses on teaching rote procedures to solve problems, though these procedures are not usually motivated by goals. As a result, students have trouble flexibly using procedures and generalizing their knowledge to solve novel problems that differ from the problems they practice during instruction. In the following…

Self-regulated learners are expected to plan their own learning. Because planning is a complex task, it is not self-evident that all learners can perform this task successfully. In this study, we examined the effects of two planning support tools on the quality of created plans, planning behavior, task load, and acquired knowledge. Sixty-five…