Despite the introduction of Common Core State Standards and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics urging educators to explore fundamental concepts in mathematics at a deeper level, the majority of mathematics education has remained aimed at initial skill acquisition. The result has led to students learning to mimic a standard set of…

NASA eClips™, developed by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) in partnership with NASA, provides educators with standards-based educational resources that seek to increase student science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy through the lens of NASA. Over the past four years a new project within NASA eClips™, NASA…

This study explored elementary pre-service teachers' content knowledge for dissolving before and after an instructional intervention over a 15-week science methods course. Pre-service teacher knowledge was examined using pre/post concept maps (Cmaps) and drawings with narrative descriptions. A mixed methods approach was used for both data…

With a rapid increase in the number of people who own a handheld device, such as an iPod, education researchers and administrators started looking for a way to use a handheld device to foster student learning. However, the current use of a mobile device in education is quite limited. With few exceptions, it is mostly used as a simple media player…

The goal of this project was to help science teachers shift to a more inquiry-based teaching style by supplying learning tools that support a more student-centered approach. The project employed PSI (Personal Study Instrument) Sim Modules, a simulation-based electronic learning environment designed to address misconceptions in middle school…

Inequalities are considered among the most useful tools of investigation in pure and applied mathematics; yet their didactical aspects have not received much attention in mathematics education research until recently. An important aspect of teaching problem solving at the secondary level deals with the notion of equivalence of algebraic…

This article reports on results of an exploratory study on undergraduate pre-service teachers' understanding of graphical representations of motion functions. The study described pre-service teachers' explorations using a CBR device. Pre-service teachers' growth was studied in two dimensions: (a) in their learning of the mathematics involved and…

Describes the development, use, and evaluation of the "Osmosis Program" as a teaching tool to elicit and challenge college students' understanding about diffusion and osmosis. Results showed students using the program performed better on a diffusion and osmosis assessment test than students not using the program. (Author/MKR)

Describes a simple 16-item instrument, the Propositional Logic Test (PLT), that is based on Piagetian theory and a study that explored the use of the PLT in diagnosing student misunderstandings. Analysis of individual student responses revealed a number of systematic errors in interpreting the logical operations in the PLT items. (Contains 23…

Described is a computer-based tutoring program that helped to improve computational performance for 16 preservice elementary teachers by effectively increasing their awareness of a tendency to divide consistently by the smaller of 2 numbers presented within division word problems. (JJK)

Examines the use of a computer simulation program as a tool to help in the understanding of wave phenomena. After analyzing some of the main difficulties and common misconceptions about waves, features of the "Making Waves" software package are described. Figures showing a typical monitor display are presented. (YP)

Contains six abstracts of papers from the National Educational Computing Conference of 1986. Topics of the papers focus on the effects of teacher involvement, computer programs in applied mathematics and physics, microcomputer labs in science, graphing misconceptions, science simulations, and mastery learning with computers. (ML)