This report explores the definition and selection of science and technology-related (STEM) jobs in-depth. Examples from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are described, with similarities and differences highlighted. [This document was produced by the author(s) based on their research for "What Is STEM? The Need for Unpacking…

There is a great deal of concern regarding teacher impacts on student achievement being used as a substantial portion of a teacher's performance evaluation. This study investigated the degree of concordance and discordance between mathematics teacher ranking using value tables and covariate regression, which have both been used as measures for…

Children normally feel unable or less confident to express their ideas clearly, freely, and critically both orally and in writing when learning a language. Research has demonstrated that children's early exposure to Bloom's Taxonomy levels in stories has a "remarkable power" on them (Dickinson, et al. 2012) and helps develop their…

The purpose of this study was to explore social skills of young children with reduced social competence, from the perspective of parents and teachers. The study adopted a descriptive, quantitative design using secondary data from occupational therapy assessment information on 241 children. The data were collected using a parent and teacher…

Research suggests that educators' use of resources influence the ground-level effects of policy. However, we know very little about educators' utilization of policy resources. This study employs a mixed-methods research design to provide empirical evidence of the policy resources available to education policy implementers and the ways in which…

To learn why natural selection acts only on existing variation, students categorize processes as either creative or sorting. This activity helps students confront the misconception that adaptations evolve because species need them.

Purpose: To quantify the articulatory distinctiveness of 8 major English vowels and 11 English consonants based on tongue and lip movement time series data using a data-driven approach. Method: Tongue and lip movements of 8 vowels and 11 consonants from 10 healthy talkers were collected. First, classification accuracies were obtained using 2…

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use…

Chemistry students encounter a variety of terms, definitions, and classification schemes that many instructors expect students to memorize and be able to use. This research investigated students' descriptions of ionic and covalent bonding beyond definitions in order to explore students' knowledge about chemical bonding. Using Johnstone's Multiple…

Much research has demonstrated a shape bias in categorizing and naming solid objects. This research has shown that when an entity is conceptualized as an individual object, adults and children attend to the object's shape. Separate research in the domain of numerical cognition suggest that there are distinct processes for quantifying small and…

The ability to classify the political leaning of a large number of articles and items is valuable to both academic research and practical applications. The challenge, though, is not only about developing innovative classification algorithms, which constitutes a "classifier" theme in this thesis, but also about how to define the…

State education agencies (SEAs) are central players in initiating and leading new reform efforts. However, traditional approaches to providing public information are not adequate for producing the necessary awareness and support to implement reforms statewide and at the local level. SEAs often have very few staff or other resources devoted to…

We introduce a new statistical procedure for the identification of unobserved categories that vary between individuals and in which objects may span multiple categories. This procedure can be used to analyze data from a proposed sorting task in which individuals may simultaneously assign objects to multiple piles. The results of a synthetic…

Two recent lines of research suggest that explicitly naming objects at study influences subsequent memory for those objects at test. Lupyan (2008) suggested that naming "impairs" memory by a representational shift of stored representations of named objects toward the prototype (labeling effect). MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010)…

How do explaining and prior knowledge contribute to learning? Four experiments explored the relationship between explanation and prior knowledge in category learning. The experiments independently manipulated whether participants were prompted to explain the category membership of study observations and whether category labels were informative in…