How should men and women be seated around a dinner table to maximize conversation between members of the opposite sex? What can be said about the distribution of points around two concentric circles? How are the white and black keys on the piano keyboard organized? What spin configuration in the Ising model minimizes energy? These four problems…

School students of all ages, including those who subsequently become teachers, have limited experience posing their own mathematical problems. Yet problem posing, both as an act of mathematical inquiry and of mathematics teaching, is part of the mathematics education reform vision that seeks to promote mathematics as an worthy intellectual…

This article describes how sixth-grade students developed concrete models to solve division of fractions story problems. Students developed separate two-step procedures to solve measurement and partitive problems, drawing on invented procedures for division of whole numbers. Errors also tended to be specific to the type of division problem…

This paper attempts to describe a research project related to Form Six students' learning "Goal Programming" using an interactive multimedia (IMM) courseware. The purpose of the study is to determine the suitability of the design in the multimedia courseware for learning "Goal Programming" and students' preferences toward the…

Teachers know that real mathematical understanding includes the higher-level skills of comparing, contrasting, and making connections among different computational approaches. What mathematical connections can students make when asked to explore a task that is posed in three different ways? This article describes a unique task structure that helps…

The recent considerable developments in the field of biology have necessitated the knowledge of mathematics and its applications in biology. Therefore; most of the universities, now, believe that it is essential to include mathematics courses in the curricula of biology departments. Taking this fact into consideration, this study aims at exploring…

An order-analysis procedure, which uses graph theory to extract efficiently nonredundant, unidimensional chains of items from multidimensional data sets and chain consistency as a criterion for chain membership is outlined in this paper. The procedure is intended as an alternative to the Reynolds (1976) procedure which is described as being…

Derivation of formulas and example problems for determining the size of a plane angle are given to help in drafting work. The authors state that a small hand calculator will provide greater accuracy in solving these problems than a protractor. (MF)

Problems involving the relative positions of four soccer teams and possible point allocations for the teams are analyzed. (DT)

Closed curves of constant width are studied to determine which types might serve as boundaries for the cross section of a roller and which types might define the shape of a wheel. (DT)

This note refers to EJ 056 482. (CB)

Some suggestions for computations are given for simultaneous determination of squared multiple correlations for all measures. (Authors)