A previous study by Muris, Merckelbach, and Van Spauwen [1] demonstrated that children display emotional reasoning irrespective of their anxiety levels. That is, when estimating whether a situation is dangerous, children not only rely on objective danger information but also on their "own" anxiety-response. The present study further examined…

The field of styles presents three major controversial issues: styles as value-laden versus value-free, styles as traits versus states, and styles as different constructs versus similar constructs with different labels. We address these issues by proposing an integrative model of styles--the Threefold Model of Intellectual Styles--which divides…

In this article I argue that the use of practical reasoning in university classrooms is necessary to establish conditions under which university teachers and students can move beyond the dominant "transmission mode" of education (teaching and learning). This mode of education had been, and in many cases remains to be prevalent in several…

One of the most important connections that must be made during the middle school years is the relationship between scientific inquiry and algebraic thinking. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways in which teachers in both mathematics and science can make this intrinsically important association for students. One way is by studying rate of change,…

We discuss how relational databases constitute an ideal framework for representing and analyzing large-scale genomic data sets in biology. As a case study, we describe a Drosophila splice-site database that we recently developed at Wesleyan University for use in research and teaching. The database stores data about splice sites computed by a…

In this article, the author shares how she used a video on animals to teach her graduate classes about subjectivity in assessment. For this video assessment, she made her students evaluate the video based on five categories: content, structure, sensitivity to audience, audio, and visual. As a teacher, she knows how impossible it is to be totally…

Although children partition by repeatedly halving easily and spontaneously as early as the age of 4, multiplicative thinking is difficult and develops over a long period in school. Given the apparently multiplicative character of repeated halving and doubling, it is natural to ask what role they might play in the development of multiplicative…

Teaching for the development of students' thinking is not a straightforward matter. It requires pedagogical skills, which are different from those of normal good quality teaching for conceptual development. It follows that providing professional development (PD) for teachers of thinking is a "hard case"--we can learn much of general value to…

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18-month-olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental…

A one-credit seminar course for junior-senior mathematics majors is described. The topic for the seminar is continued fractions, taught by a modified Moore Method, where the focus is on students creating their own mathematics. The students make conjectures after completing computational problems, then work on refining the needed hypotheses,…

The newspaper is a source of up-to-date and compelling information that teachers can use to teach current events. In this article, the author discusses why it makes sense for social studies educators to use newspapers in their classrooms. He also presents information about the Newspaper in Education (NIC) program and explains how interested…

Students' established conclusions about the world can often hinder a teacher's efforts to suggest new ideas and new ways to pursue alternative explanations. Flexible thinking helps students practice the value that one's present conclusions should remain tentative and subject to re-evaluation. Meinig's ten alternative perspectives for seeing a…

How children are guided in the development of their thinking is now crucial in the twenty-first century. Over the past decades special thinking skills programmes have been developed to enhance thinking but these programmes have so far been unable to produce clear evidence to support their effectiveness. This article argues that due to the complex…

The Kirby-Bauer assay, also called the disc diffusion assay, is a standard procedure used in clinical laboratories to test the susceptibility of patients' bacterial isolates to antibiotics. In the assay, the bacteria are swabbed onto an agar plate, and paper discs impregnated with antibiotics are placed on the agar. The antibiotic diffuses from…

Adults and children often encounter situations where they have to make judgments about "how much" or "how long" or "how many." The significance of estimation as an ordinary, everyday, and natural aspect of measurement needs to be conveyed to students through their mathematical experiences. Many students, however, tend…