The National Science Education Standards (NSES; National Research Council [NRC], 1996) include Science and Technology as one of the eight categories of content standards. The science and technology standards establish connections between the natural and designed worlds and provide students with opportunities to develop decision-making abilities.…

Teachers who have tried problem-based historical inquiry have often found its demands overwhelming. Both teachers and students need a support structure to assist them with the inquiry process. The Persistent Issues in History (PIH) Network seeks to nurture and support a national community of teachers who engage their students in problem-based…

We describe an undergraduate laboratory experiment that combines the advantages of problem-based learning with the need for biochemistry students to become proficient in practical laboratory skills. It also avoids the need to obtain ethical approval for recruiting volunteers and eliminates any possible biosafety issues with the handling and…

The students need not compute dependent values required in making line graphs but to teach the students the usage of graphing calculator to plot, calculating and graph linear equations, which are best suited to real world data. In this initial learning process, the teacher should give minimum support to the students in arriving at a solution as…

Students should be encouraged to focus on a big mathematical idea and to look for connections between problems and solution strategies. This unified view suggests that the students are developing computational fluency with fractions.

There are many different reasons why children have problems paying attention. One child might be visually oversensitive and thereby distracted by bright sunlight coming in through a window or by too much color on a bulletin board. Another child, who is oversensitive to smells, might be distracted by the teacher's perfume or by the odor coming from…

Teaching methods often promote fact gathering and memorization rather than the use of those facts to solve complex, realistic problems. Students easily memorize basic facts, steps and procedures, repeating them flawlessly from memory when asked. The problem, however, lies in teaching students how to use these facts and procedures creatively in…

In this article, the authors provide an instructional resource for presenting the indirect method of the statement of cash flows (SCF) in an introductory financial accounting course. The authors focus primarily on presenting a comprehensive example that illustrates the "why" of SCF preparation and show how journal entries and T-accounts can be…

Science has a role to play in the resolution of many of the issues deemed controversial in all societies. However, evidence of a lack of public confidence in science and scientists as effective problem-solvers continues to accumulate. This paper speculates that this lack of confidence might in part be due to the way in which science educators…

In this article, we provide an understanding of the term "numeracy" as it is used in Australia and a description of numeracy education in this country. In particular, we discuss the role of outcomes-based curriculum frameworks and outline the dominant teaching approaches. The focus is on students with learning difficulties and how they…

In this paper it is argued that the current trend of making assessment criteria more explicit in higher education may have a deleterious effect on students' learning. Helping students to concentrate on assessment criteria paradoxically means that they may take a strategic approach and end up focusing on the superficial aspects of their assessment…

We show that there is a link between a standard calculus problem of finding the best view of a painting and special tangent lines to the graphs of exponential functions. Surprisingly, the exponential function with the "best view" is not the one with the base "e." A similar link is established for families of functions obtained by composing…

Students have their own attitudes and opinions about the various social problems that affect their world. When the author and his students discuss different social problems in class, students inevitably disagree with one another and they also disagree with him. Usually the disagreements are mild and respectful, but sometimes they can become…

This paper distinguishes among "contextualizing", "conceptualizing", and "problem-centring" as three basic approaches to interdisciplinary curriculum. This typology is based on the type of inquiry that takes place in the classroom. For example, if the guiding epistemology in the interdisciplinary work is that of the humanities, the mode of…

From the start of the year, the author's goal is to teach his students to be metacognitive thinkers. This means that they will think about what they are doing during each step of the inquiry process. The author uses a variety of methods to enculturate students into using the thinking processes and developing the dispositions necessary for them to…