This paper provides an instrumental account of precalculus students' graphical process for solving polynomial inequalities. It is carried out in terms of the students' instrumental schemes as mediated by handheld graphing calculators and in cooperation with their classmates in a classroom setting. The ethnographic narrative relays an instrumental…

Moral sensitivity is the first component of the 4-component moral action process (J. R. Rest, 1986). The author reviews moral sensitivity operationalization and measurement across multiple samples and domains. She reviews 3 definitions of the construct (i.e., "recognition and affective response, recognition, and recognition and ascription of…

This paper considers mathematical abstraction as arising through a natural mechanism of the biological brain in which complicated phenomena are compressed into thinkable concepts. The neurons in the brain continually fire in parallel and the brain copes with the saturation of information by the simple expedient of suppressing irrelevant data and…

In this article, the author describes her attempt to develop more interactive mental mathematics sessions. She observed that her students perceive the multiplication tables as a series of facts which are either known or not known, not as tools which could be used to derive other facts in a flexible manner. She therefore undertook the task of…

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…

A commonly accepted definition of online learning is that students have access to learning experiences in: time, place, pace, learning style, content, assessment, and pathways (Chen, 2003). Although this is true, there is a considerable concern about the level of abstraction involved in online education. Critics of flexible learning call it just…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an exploration of parents', teachers' and children's perspectives on children's understanding of wellbeing with the aim of illuminating and comparing the conceptualisation of wellbeing from these three perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: The participatory method developed to undertake the…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

Previously, we proposed a model of student reasoning which combines the roles of representation, analogy, and layering of meaning--analogical scaffolding [Podolefsky and Finkelstein, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 3, 010109 (2007)]. The present empirical studies build on this model to examine its utility and demonstrate the vital intertwining of…

The findings of this study indicate that students can be taught to avoid specified verbal operations which block problem-solving processes without detriment to the processes themselves. (RC)

Validity of the Attitudes Toward Work and Money Questionnaire as a predictor of vocational adjustment for mentally retarded adults who were clients of an intensive rehabilitation program was assessed. (Author/RC)

Argues that for effective drug education to occur students and teachers must learn conditional thinking that takes into account the many situations surrounding the organism's environment. (RB)

A propositional logic game which is a subtest of the new British intelligence scale was analyzed to determine the extent to which skills proper to a single Piagetian period, formal operations, were hierarchically ordered. Item response patterns from 60 14-year-olds were categorized by means of ordering theory, a boolean algebraic measurement…

A study explored the degree to which people can capture the meaning of logical terms, using mental imagery. It was then hypothesized that: (1) subjects generally would fail to express logical relationships accurately, and (2) abstract images would be more difficult to capture than would concrete ones. Subjects, 25 college students, were asked to…