This profile is designed to be a recording sheet for monitoring an individual student's progress throughout the school year. Seventh grade assessment materials and the Strategies for Instruction in Mathematics suggest tasks and questions that can be used for on-going and summative assessment. Directions for use and descriptions of the four levels…

The Structure-of-Intellect Tests are shown to represent promising alternatives to the traditional commercial standardized tests now widely used in predicting success in modern algebra. (Author/NE)

Presented are a series of word problems which give students the opportunity to use or develop problem solving skills. The problems are open-ended, with possible answers included. (JP)

Three strategies were used to teach 39 community college students about partition of a set.'' Mean achievement of the Exemplification group on the exemplification test was significantly greater than the average of the means of the Characterization-followed-by-exemplification group and the Characterization-preceded-and-followed-by-exemplification…

The use of unipacs, activity units each covering one basic concept in second-year algebra and containing behavioral objectives, learning activities, and student self-tests, is described; details of class organization, scheduling, and evaluation of the course are given. (DT)

The philosophy and contents of a single one-year course preparatory to college algebra and trigonometry are presented. (MM)

Several brief articles are included in this section. "Purple Puzzlers" are challenging problems for algebra students. "Linear Invaders" is a game to reinforce concepts of graphing lines. "The Diagonal Method" is used to prove that the real and natural numbers cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence. (MNS)

Variations on a card trick are noted, with a formula for generalizing them. Another trick which can be proved with algebraic principles is then presented. (MNS)

The first presentation discusses a way of teaching second-year algebra students that the harmonic series diverges, and notes some issues in instruction on the concept of limit. A second item describes an approach to a warm-up drill claimed to be painless to construct and self-checking. (MP)

National assessment data on student performance in several phases of algebra are reported. It is noted that this performance has not reached the point of mastery even for most students with two years of algebra and a year of geometry. However, the data are not thought to suggest complete failure. (MP)

Teaching ideas related to the instruction of decimal division as the opposite of multiplication, an approach to approximating logarithms that help reveal their properties, and the simple creation of algebraic equations with radical expressions for use as exercises and test questions are presented. (MP)

Ideas are presented regarding: (1) unique learning activities for students who have difficulty with operations with signed numbers; (2) a mathematical inspection of a unique card trick that can be expressed as an equation; and (3) sketching of graphs of composite trigonometric functions. (MP)

Geometry is revealed as one of the most universal and useful tools in all parts of mathematics, with the idea of a "pure" geometry divorced from algebra an historically recent idea. (MP)