Amongst the first of the challenges facing prospective first-year university students is the need to procure funding for their studies. Indeed, demand for funding for students to access higher education far exceeds supply in South Africa. One solution has been the creation of a government loan scheme, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme…

Situation awareness is a key construct in human factors and arises from a process of situation assessment (SA). SA comprises the perception of information, its integration with existing knowledge, the search for new information, and the prediction of the future state of the world, including the consequences of planned actions. Causal models…

The goal of this paper is to propose tables of contextual cognition as a tool for research and a model to facilitate the intercultural dialogue on science education in schools. The proposal arose from a qualitative case study, involving the use of tables of compared cognition in biology classes in a Brazilian public school. The results indicate…

Performance assessments, scenario-based tasks, and other groups of items carry a risk of violating the local item independence assumption made by unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models. Previous studies have identified negative impacts of ignoring such violations, most notably inflated reliability estimates. Still, the influence of this…

Recognizing the roles of mathematics in society is an important goal for the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling. The Likert-scales method is a simple and effective tool to assess student appreciation about the utility of mathematics; however, it does not reveal the detailed aspects of student perceptions of the roles of mathematics in…

This paper aims to investigate the following question: How do students use mathematics in modeling activities? With this purpose, the paper reports on mathematization and use of mathematics, and deals with empirical data with focus on modeling activities performed by students in the first year and in the fourth year of a degree in mathematics.…

For students working on realistic complex modelling problems as autonomously as possible the support by a tutor is indispensable for the students. However, how this support can be realised is still a question that has not been sufficiently answered. Based on prior research, it turned out that teacher interventions based on heuristic strategies…

Due to tremendous worldwide changes, the entrepreneurial imperative demands innovation. Therefore, companies as well as employees require innovative thinking and acting skills to cope with modern challenges. Opportunity Recognition represents the starting point for such entrepreneurial endeavours. Hence, this paper focuses on modelling Opportunity…

Online discussion boards are commonplace in higher education courses, intended either to supplement or in certain cases, replace face-to-face conversations. This article considers discussion boards from the perspective of David Kantor and Otto Scharmer's generative conversational models. It goes on to establish a rationale for applying these…

Research dispels the myth that teachers peak as professionals early in their careers, hitting a performance plateau after only a few years on the job. While most teachers keep honing and polishing their craft the longer they stay in the classroom, a fair number do not. Over the years, research on how experts in a variety of fields have continued…

Despite the overwhelming evidence that higher education data are nested at various levels, single-level techniques such as regression and analysis of variance are commonly used to investigate student outcomes. This is problematic as a mismatch in methodology and research questions can lead to biased parameter estimates. The purpose of this study…

Financial concerns and public scrutiny are causing many educational leaders and community stakeholders to study the district configurations of school corporations, academic preparation, and ideal school size. The purpose of this qualitative case-study research design was to identify and better understand successful small school districts as…

Traditional liberal arts colleges employ a variety of initiatives to connect students to work opportunities--internship programs, co-ops, and work study, to name a few. These initiatives often provide students with some additional income or expose them to a potential career, but they do not necessarily go so far as to fully integrate employment…

Mathematics educators advocate for the use of models as an instructional practice that can potentially aid in building students' understanding of difficult topics. Integers and integer operations are historically problematic for students and are critically important in both arithmetic and the future study of algebra. In this chapter, I explore one…

Knowledge of prerequisite dependencies is crucial to several aspects of learning, from the organization of learning content to the selection of personalized remediation or enrichment for each learner. As the amount of content is scaled up, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually specify all of the prerequisites among the different…