Pearson's Learning Foundations describe the optimal conditions for learning and reflect the learner experience Pearson hopes their products will create. Pearson does this by incorporating the Learning Design Principles. Each of the Learning Design Principles goes into detail about a key principle, supporting product design and marketing by…

This article demonstrates how instructors of professionalism and ethics training programs can integrate a professional decision-making tool in training curricula. This tool can help trainees understand how to apply professional decision-making strategies to address the threats posed by a variety of psychological and environmental factors when they…

Offering secondary math educators an innovative holistic and process-orientated approach for implementing nonroutine problems into their curriculum, this book defines and establishes practical strategies to develop students' problem-solving skills. The text focuses on the process skills necessary to solve nonroutine problems in mathematics and…

Self-directed student learning begins with self-directed educators. Teachers in Greenville, North Carolina, are training in the Habits of Mind, a series of thinking behaviors that support self-directed learning by helping students successfully tackle complex problems. The authors outline key instructional strategies that have grown from these…

Mathematical modeling, a key strand in mathematics, engages students in rich, authentic, exciting, and culturally relevant problems and connects abstract mathematics to the surrounding world. In this, article, the authors describe a modeling activity that can be used when teaching linear equations. Modeling problems, in general, are typically high…

We share ideas for preparing for and enacting high-cognitive demand tasks in ways that support students in articulating and justifying their ideas. We offer strategies for developing and posing several types of purposeful questions: (1) eliciting thinking, (2) generating ideas, (3) clarifying explanations, and (4) justifying claims.

This article demonstrates how to consider differentiating instruction for diverse learners while maintaining the cognitive demand of a mathematics task. The authors present scenarios involving hypothetical cases of students in inclusive classrooms who engaged in productive struggle within the differentiated task. The authors specifically focus on…

Teachers across all grade levels agree that problem solving and reasoning are areas of weakness in students. Assessments among U.S. students indicate that these weaknesses persist (NCTM 2014) in spite of repeated calls that date back more than thirty years for increased problem solving, reasoning, and sense making in our schools. The NCTM is…

The Encouraging Persistence Maintaining Challenge (EMPC) Project has been working with secondary teachers in Melbourne as they seek to build persistence in students, during work on challenging mathematics tasks. The authors have developed sequences of tasks in various topic areas for Years 7 and 8, which require students to connect different…

Mastering algebra is important for future math and postsecondary success. Educators will find practical recommendations for how to improve algebra instruction in the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide, "Teaching Strategies for Improving Algebra Knowledge in Middle and High School Students". The methods and examples included in…

Many students lack problem-solving skills. As teenagers, they tend to blame external forces or other people when something goes wrong, instead of trying to understand the root cause to prevent it from happening again. This article discusses the Lean Six Sigma methodology for problem solving, which the Board of Cooperative Educational Services in…

Early in their introductory college linear algebra class, the author's students learn to use a matrix to represent and solve systems of linear equations. Indeed, this simple idea is perhaps the foundational idea of the course. Nevertheless, the author was delighted to find that the study of linear systems can lead to surprisingly deep mathematics.…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

In assessment, the ability to construct test items that measure a targeted skill is fundamental to validity and alignment. The ability to do the reverse is also important: determining what skill an existing test item measures. This paper presents a model for classifying test items that builds on procedures developed by others, including Bloom…

Three sample physics problems are presented in this article. The solutions to the three problems addresses a major student difficulty in problem solving--knowing where to begin. The first suggested step is to begin by stating what is asked for. Step 2 is identifying the fundamental physics that underlies the problem situation. Step 3 is isolating…