Developing an understanding of place value and the base-ten number system is considered a fundamental goal of the early primary grades. For years, teachers have anecdotally reported that students struggle with place-value concepts. Among the common errors cited are misreading such numbers as 26 and 62 by seeing them as identical in meaning,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in 19 preservice chemistry teachers' understandings of the structure of matter, including the aspects of the physical states of matter, the physical composition of matter, and the chemical composition of matter, before, immediately after, and months after they received a specific instruction.…

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," public school teachers still find themselves dealing with student resistance to learning about biological evolution. Some teachers deal with this pressure by undermining, deemphasizing, or even omitting the topic in their science curriculum. Others face the…

Scope and method of study: The purpose of this study was to unpack the understandings pre-service elementary teachers have pertaining to the ideas of pattern and function. The intent was to bring insight into how mathematics teacher educators can use patterning activities to prepare pre-service elementary teachers to support the development of…

We present a nontrigonometric graphical method for predicting the trajectory of a projectile when the angle and initial velocity are known. Students enrolled in a general education conceptual physics course typically have weak backgrounds in trigonometry, making inaccessible the standard analytical calculation of projectile range. Furthermore,…

In this article, some classroom experiments are described for correcting the common misconception that the operation of a siphon depends on atmospheric pressure. One experiment makes use of a chain model of a siphon and another demonstrates that flow rate is dependent on the height difference between the inflow and outflow of a siphon and not…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

This study examines how Information Systems Engineering School students on the verge of their graduation understand the mechanism of exception handling. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: we construct a questionnaire aimed at examining students' level of understanding concerning exceptions; we classify and analyse the students'…

In the author's talks on education across the country, parents and teachers often ask about products and programs that purport to teach young children to read and to do math. In his 40-plus-year academic career in the field of early childhood education, the author has reviewed a large number of published curricular materials and activities for…

Effectively teaching the concepts of osmosis to college-level students is a major obstacle in biological education. Therefore, a novel computer model is presented that allows students to observe the random nature of particle motion simultaneously with the seemingly directed net flow of water across a semipermeable membrane during osmotic…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) lay out a comprehensive vision for the way that learning progressions (or other "road maps") might be used to inform and coordinate formative and summative purposes of assessment. As Black, Wilson, and others have been arguing for over a decade, the effective use of formative assessment has great potential to…

Clickers are a popular tool in large science classes. The authors find that clickers can also be used in small undergraduate- and graduate-level science classes, and to some extent also in laboratory classes, to achieve the same purposes as in large classes. Issues that can be addressed using clickers include fully engaging all students,…

Explore how melting ice sheets affect global sea levels. Sea-level rise (SLR) is a rise in the water level of the Earth's oceans. There are two major kinds of ice in the polar regions: sea ice and land ice. Land ice contributes to SLR and sea ice does not. This article explores the characteristics of sea ice and land ice and provides some hands-on…

Teachers in various contexts worldwide are sometimes unfairly criticized for not putting teaching methods developed for the well-resourced classrooms of Western countries into practice. Factors such as the teachers' "misconceptualizations" of "imported" methods, including Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), are often blamed,…

Conceptual grammatical knowledge is an area which causes problems at different levels of education. This article examines the ideas of conceptual change theory as a basis for establishing a new grammar teaching method. The research strategy which I use is educational design research and the research data have been collected from teacher students…