We discuss the limits of the equation of the period of a simple pendulum, T[subscript s] = 2[pi][square root]l/g, frequently used in high-school and university classrooms to measure the acceleration of gravity. We evaluate the relative error in determining the acceleration of gravity with this simple equation instead of a more realistic one,…

Research has shown that word problem difficulty is influenced by various linguistic, numerical and general variables, but results in this area are inconsistent. This paper focuses on the question of how the order of numerical data, the context, the position of the unknown transformation, and the length of the statement in an additive word problem,…

This paper provides a set of five indicators of CAS use, which provide a means to analyse a student's written solution to determine whether they used CAS for solving a given problem. These indicators provide a way for researchers and teachers to determine CAS use without requiring classroom observation or the explicit recording of extra…

Having hardly learnt any English or having at best learnt wrong English (which is worse than no English) during their junior and secondary school years and having little or no exposure to English outside their classrooms, and partly due to certain weaknesses and shortcomings in what the teachers teach and how they teach, college students in some…

Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self-assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self-assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be 'high-quality provision', as defined in the…

Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s' writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of historical discourse that underpin…

Sprego is programming with spreadsheet functions. The present paper provides introductory Sprego examples which have so far only been available in Hungarian. Spreadsheet environments offer both a programming tool which best serves beginner and end-user programmers' interest, and an approach which lightens the burden of coding and language details.…

Participation in society is increasingly dependent on educational achievement. Accordingly, society as a whole is committing more resources to education to prevent the adverse outcome of students moving through the school system only to emerge without the knowledge and skills that they might be expected to attain. In this paper, we explore the…

In online educational systems we can easily collect and analyze extensive data about student learning. Current practice, however, focuses only on some aspects of these data, particularly on correctness of students answers. When a student answers incorrectly, the submitted wrong answer can give us valuable information. We provide an overview of…

"Specific Mathematics Assessment that Reveal Thinking" (abbreviated as "smart tests") provide an on-line formative assessment of middle years students. They aim to put information from research on students' understanding directly into the hands of teachers, by providing quick automated diagnosis of learning for all students in…

Nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) are employed widely in various studies on language development and are often relied upon as diagnostic tools. However, the mechanisms that underlie children's performance in NWRTs are very little understood. In this paper we present NWRT data from typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (5:4-6:8) and examine the…

In a recent study we (Greaney & Arrow, 2009) undertook an analysis of the types of spelling errors that students had made during a National Education Monitoring Project writing task (Crooks, Flockton & White, 2007). We discussed several issues related to spelling, including the value of analysing students' error-response patterns as a way…

We present a new feedback strategy implemented in a natural language generation-based e-learning system for German as a second language (L2). Although the system recognizes a large proportion of the grammar errors in learner-produced written sentences, its automatically generated feedback only addresses errors against rules that are relevant at…

This paper reports on "The National Prescribing Curriculum" (NPC), a series of online, case-based modules designed to improve prescribing performance and confidence in emerging Australian prescribers. The modules mirror the decision-making process outlined in the "WHO Guide to Good Prescribing" (de Vries "et al.",…

Evidence from recent research suggests that in the UK the public perception of errors in national examinations is that they are simply mistakes; events that are preventable. This perception predominates over the more sophisticated technical view that errors arise from many sources and create an inevitable variability in assessment outcomes. The…