Today, there is a vast amount of online material for learners. However, due to the lack of prerequisite information needed to master them, a lot of time is spent in identifying the right learning content for mastering these concepts. A system that captures underlying prerequisites needed for learning different concepts can help improve the quality…

Curriculum research is an important tool for understanding complex processes within a degree program. In particular, stochastic graphical models and simulations on related curriculum graphs have been used to make predictions about dropout rates, grades, and degree completion time. There exists, however, little research on changes in the curriculum…

This study describes students' learning obstacles in solving early algebra problems requiring functional thinking ability. To reach this aim, qualitative research was conducted in this study. Participants of this study were 39 ninth graders and a mathematics teacher at one of the lower secondary schools in Bandung, Indonesia. The data were…

The author of this article describes a game-theory-based economics class on how people should, and do, form beliefs, communicate, and make decisions under uncertainty. Topics include Bayesian and non-Bayesian belief updating, the value of information, communication games, advertising, political media, and social learning. The only prerequisite is…

Knowledge of prerequisite dependencies is crucial to several aspects of learning, from the organization of learning content to the selection of personalized remediation or enrichment for each learner. As the amount of content is scaled up, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually specify all of the prerequisites among the different…

Skill prerequisite information is useful for tutoring systems that assess student knowledge or that provide remediation. These systems often encode prerequisites as graphs designed by subject matter experts in a costly and time-consuming process. In this paper, we introduce "Combined student Modeling and prerequisite Discovery"…

The incorporation of prerequisite skill structures into educational systems helps to identify the order in which concepts should be presented to students to optimize student achievement. Many skills have a causal relationship in which one skill must be presented before another, indicating a strong skill relationship. Knowing this relationship can…

Prerequisite skill structures have been closely studied in past years leading to many data-intensive methods aimed at refining such structures. While many of these proposed methods have yielded success, defining and refining hierarchies of skill relationships are often difficult tasks. The relationship between skills in a graph could either be…

The author of this paper argues "is mathematics indispensable and are pre-requisites needed in mathematics courses?" that the answer to one question is, "yes," and to the other, "no;" however, the response to the questions is inverted in this sentence. Such responses might surprise some people; but, the author shall argue that learning requires…

Summer pre-sessional courses in English for academic purposes (EAP), which prepare growing numbers of international students for degree programmes at UK universities, are facing greater challenges in how to provide the physical space and human resources for their effective and efficient delivery. The affordances of the internet now make other…

Nearly 100 students were given a Pre-Test in psychology on the first day of class without warning in order to assess their knowledge of basic course content derived from the prerequisites of the course (PSYC-100 Introduction to Psychology or PSYC-220 Child Development) and other life experiences. This was intended as a low-stakes testing…

There have been broad, and effective efforts in recent years to strengthen the humanities; however, there are still many problems, questions, and disagreements--especially in the areas of standards and competencies--to be resolved. Current legislative and board attention to standards provides an impetus for a serious review of current practices to…

Drawing from research and observations at Lansing Community College (Michigan) (LCC), this paper argues that typical arithmetic courses do little to prepare students to master algebra, and proposes an alternative set of arithmetic skills as actual prerequisites to algebra. The first section offers a description of the algebra sequence at LCC,…

A research project was designed and conducted to determine specifically whether the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) has any predictive value in determining how well masters of business administration (MBA) students perform in graduate management education. Several types of information were drawn from the student files of 360 past or…

In 1987, Santa Barbara City College, California, received a grant to develop valid and culturally fair assessment procedures for placing students into appropriate level courses. Specifically, the project sought to: (1) determine faculty and student perceptions of the skills needed to succeed in entry-level college classes; (2) examine the…