This report offers California college faculty a closer look at contextualized teaching and learning (CTL) as a promising set of strategies and practices that can be expanded through the state's Basic Skills Initiative. The report is relevant to a range of instructional and counseling faculty, including academic and career and technical education…

Research suggests that student enrollment in developmental level courses at the postsecondary education level increases annually. This is occurring because underprepared and/or nontraditional students' reading, writing, or math skills are inadequate to meet the challenges of college-level work. This article focuses on self-explanations as an…

In 2006-07, New York City, the largest school district in the United States, decided it would follow several other school systems in adopting a progress report program. Under its program, the city grades schools from A to F according to an accumulating point system based on the weighted average of measurements of school environment, students'…

Workforce projections worldwide show a growing need for people with strong backgrounds in math and science. As the eighth largest economy in the world, California benefits particularly from enterprises in the "STEM" fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). How well California's current public school students are…

States are increasingly focusing the mission of their elementary and secondary education systems on preparing all students for success in postsecondary education and 21st century careers. As standards have increased, so too have graduation requirements. Today, 20 states and the District of Columbia have adopted such high school graduation…

Learning about mathematics begins in the early years. Through their everyday activities, young children build important foundational knowledge and understanding of mathematics, especially when adults provide specific opportunities to learn and practice concepts and skills. Young children develop early on an informal understanding of important…

This case study seeks to explain why a Yup'ik middle schooler, Nora, from a remote Alaskan village, was differently constructed as a math learner by her 6th- and 7th-grade math teachers. When a culturally relevant curriculum was used in 6th grade, Nora had a greater opportunity for leadership, ownership of knowledge, collaborative problem solving,…

A randomized-trials design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a preschool mathematics program based on a comprehensive model of research-based curricula development. Thirty-six preschool classrooms were assigned to experimental (Building Blocks), comparison (a different preschool mathematics curriculum), or control conditions. Children were…

This study was conducted to determine the level of Achieved Learning Outcomes of Underprivileged Children provided by some selected NGOs [non-governmental organizations] in Bangladesh. Comparing the achievement among the learners of different NGOs as well as between girls and boys were the objective of the study. The study identified that…

The goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is simply stated: All children should be proficient in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. More than five years after the law was enacted, it remains unclear what "proficient" means. Because the federal law gives the states the power to define proficiency, there are 50…

The authors of this study endeavor to explore the negative opinions and perceptions of graduate students in business and social science programs, regarding their required statistics and research methods courses. The general sense of instructors of such courses is that students dread and resent having to take courses dealing with statistics and…

After 11 years of teaching, the question the author worries about now is "How do we do this well? How do we engage students in math classes? How do we convince them that math is beautiful, fun and powerful?" For the math department at the author's school, Boston Arts Academy (BAA), the answer has been to infuse creativity into math…

The decline in the development of mathematical skills in students prior to university entrance has been a matter of concern to UK higher education staff for a number of years. This article describes a pilot study that uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process to quantify the mathematical experiences of computing students prior to the start of a first…

This study examines a wide range of numerical representations (i.e., quantity, knowledge of multiplication facts, and use of parity information) in adult deaf signers. We introduce a modified version of the number bisection task, with sequential stimulus presentation, which allows for a systematic examination of mathematical skills in deaf…

Jean Louis Nicolet is a Swiss teacher of mathematics who found his subject so fascinating that he was puzzled as to why so many pupils could not share this enjoyment in their studies. He came to a conclusion which is now supported by the results of psychological research into the learning process: he suggested that the mind does not spontaneously…