The work of physics learners at all levels revolves around problems. Physics education research has inspired attention to the forms of these problems, whether conceptual or algorithmic, closed or open response, well or ill structured. Meanwhile, it has been the work of curriculum developers and instructors to develop these problems. Physics…

In this article, John O'Connor and Avi Lessing discuss their decision to create gradeless classrooms. They reached this decision by witnessing the profound cost grades hold for students and teachers alike. Grades threaten to reduce students to mere scores and teachers to bookkeepers, both groups focused more on grades than learning. By eliminating…

In education, we are concerned with the teaching and learning of subjects, but the word "subject" can refer to the discipline being studied as well as the individual who is studying. In this essay, Teresa Strong-Wilson explores this "double entendre" (which William Pinar refers to as the "double consciousness") of…

This essay describes a visionary philosophy of education at Morehouse College. The educational process at Morehouse, construed here as a form of pedagogical personalism, is personified in three luminaries of Morehouse College: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Washington Thurman, and Martin Luther King. The educational process at Morehouse should be…

The objective of this study was to examine how individual interest and knowledge acquisition are causally related. Three hypotheses were tested using a cross-lagged panel analysis (N = 186) and two quasi-experimental studies (N = 68 and N = 108) involving students from schools in Singapore. The first hypothesis is the broadly shared standard…

Student ownership in learning is a topic that has become quite prevalent in recent years. While emphasis has grown on the importance of active student involvement in learning, integration of student self-regulation strategies is often absent in elementary classrooms. A paradigm shift that encourages active involvement of students in the learning…

This paper sets forth a concept (Simon, 2017) of contrapositive equivalence and explores some related phenomena of learning through a case study of Hugo's learning in a teaching experiment guiding the reinvention of mathematical logic. Our proposed concept of contrapositive equivalence rests upon set-based meanings for mathematical categories and…

In less than two decades, online learning has expanded from virtually non-existent to nearly three million students in the U.S. taking classes, in whole or in part, online. While some may applaud this shift as evidence that the digital age has finally brought disruptive innovation to staid public education systems, there is just one problem:…

The goal of educating for creativity must be active understanding rather than passive knowing. To understand is to have the capability to re-create, which trains the ability also to create. The ability to create requires problem-finding as well as problem-solving. It requires practice. Best practice involves the emulation of creative people and…

We propose a data driven method for decomposing population level learning curve models into mutually exclusive distinctive groups each consisting of similar learning trajectories. We validate this method on six knowledge components from the log data from an online tutoring system ASSISTment. Preliminary analysis reveals interpretable patterns of…

The increasing demand for access to higher education and declining financial support from states help fuel the increasing employment of part-time faculty at US institutions of higher education. Although prior studies acknowledged employing part-time faculty is positively associated with student learning or choice of major as they bring…

It has been suggested that people and nonhuman animals protect their knowledge from interference by shifting attention toward the context when presented with information that contradicts their previous beliefs. Despite that suggestion, no studies have directly measured changes in attention while participants are exposed to an interference…

This is a response to a focus article by Briggs and Peck (2015) in issue 13(2). It should have been published in issue 13(3-4) alongside a rejoinder by Briggs and Peck that did appear. Due to an oversight, it was not published there and appears here. See issue 13(3-4) for a rejoinder to this response. Briggs and Peck (2015) propose what amounts to…

There is an assumption that any contemporary society should become a learning society to maintain stability in the face of change. Although proponents and policymakers take for granted that a society has the ability to learn, can this idea be defended? There is a problem in determining exactly what is meant by a learning society that learns. One…

In this article we will discuss how the holding of a special and dedicated work helped to change the levels of formation of the major components of cognitive activity. Cognitive activity with the content aspect is a system of perceptual, mnemonic and intellectual activity and from the form--as an individual, joint, or pseudo-individual pseudo…