The evaluation of educational or social programmes is paramount for establishing success or impact in higher education. Evaluation questions about programme goals (e.g. better performance of first-year students) or about the quality of programme strategies (design and implementation) and effectiveness of delivery (coordinator inputs and…

Many difficulties surrounding mathematical induction have been described by researchers. In this paper, I describe several underlying causes for these difficulties. In particular, the symbolic nature of induction is discussed, along with student cognitive levels, validation abilities, and proof schemes.

This paper reports an interview study of 45 English and 10 Hungarian teachers of mathematics. The semi-structured interviews focused on the teachers' professional life-histories and invited them to discuss their beliefs about the necessary subject content for the teaching and learning of mathematics. Substantial differences emerged between the two…

Attitudes to institutional authority, strength of support for moral values and maturity of socio-moral reasoning have all been identified as potential predictors of adolescent delinquency. In a sample of 12-15-year-old boys (N = 789), after checking for effects of age, IQ, social background and ethnicity, self-reported delinquency was…

The present study had two major goals. The first goal was to assess the relative difficulty among different versions of the unexpected contents task by systematically varying the dimensions of grammatical mood (indicative vs. subjunctive) and person (self vs. other), and to examine the correlational pattern between these different versions of the…

This article presents a lesson called Memory Palaces. A memory palace is a memory tool used to remember information, usually as visual images, in a sequence that is logical to the person remembering it. In his book, "In the Palaces of Memory", George Johnson calls them "...structure(s) for arranging knowledge. Lots of connections to language arts,…

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined…

The author calls into question whether learning to read and write is an exclusively logical and systematic process in which the child moves step-by-step from part to whole, as it is frequently presented in "scientific" reading research. She examines research on different types of intuitive behavior and suggests parallels in the development of…

The present study was designed to test the influence of negative mood on the self-report of individual and relational correlates of depression and marital distress. The authors applied a combined experimental mood induction procedure, based on music, autobiographical recall, and environmental manipulation. Results showed that the mood manipulation…

Recent data on teacher attrition indicate that approximately 15 percent of teachers either leave the profession or move from one school to another each year. The attrition rate is highest for teachers new to the profession with 30-50 percent leaving within five years. High rates of attrition are a contributing cause of various educational problems…

Objective: This study describes the development of an engagement scale for use with youth in residential treatment centers. Engagement includes attitude about treatment, bond with providers, and participation in treatment activities. Method: Interview data were collected at the midpoint in residence of 130 youth in two centers. Items were selected…

This synthesis paper discusses the research exploring analogical reasoning, the role of analogies in the engineering design process, and educational applications for analogical reasoning. Researchers have discovered that analogical reasoning is often a fundamental cognitive tool in design problem solving. Regarding the possible role of analogical…

The concept of symmetry is fundamental to mathematics. Arguments and proofs based on symmetry are often aesthetically pleasing because they are subtle and succinct and non-standard. This article uses notions of symmetry to approach the solutions to a broad range of mathematical problems. It responds to Krutetskii's criteria for mathematical…

"Exploring" is a magazine of science, art, and human perception, produced by Exploratorium in collaboration with other participating museums. This issue focuses on puzzles and problem solving. Brain teasers, puzzles, and the strategies for solving them are included. Features include: (1) "Homework Assignment #3" (Paul Doherty);…

Describes a study in which fifth-graders learned how to operate electronic calculators and used them on a mathematics achievement test. The results indicated that the children with calculators outperformed the control children on the straight computational problems but did more poorly than the controls on thought problems. (JMB)