Video analysis helps students to connect physical, mathematical, and graphical models with the phenomena that the models represent and improves student kinematic graph interpretation skills. The wide-spread availability of easy to use software packages like Logger Pro (Vernier), Capstone (PASCO), and Tracker have led to many introductory physics…

In colleges, programming is increasingly becoming a general education course of almost all STEM majors as well as some art majors, resulting in an emerging demand for scalable programming education. To support scalable education, teaching activities such as grading and feedback have to be automated. Recently, online judge systems have been…

The logos of many atomic energy regulatory bodies present a paradox in that the depictions of atomic structure that they portray tend to be 'wrong' in relation to the rules that govern pictorial representations of atomic structure that we teach. These logos present chemistry educators with excellent classroom resources to enhance critical thinking…

The ideas behind the constraint-based modeling (CBM) approach to the design of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) grew out of attempts in the 1980's to clarify how declarative and procedural knowledge interact during skill acquisition. The learning theory that underpins CBM was based on two conceptual innovations. The first innovation was to…

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…

Errors bear the potential to improve knowledge acquisition, provided that learners are able to deal with them in an adaptive and reflexive manner. However, learners experience a host of different--often impeding or maladaptive--emotional and motivational states in the face of academic errors. Research has made few attempts to develop a theory that…

Early in their study of one-dimensional kinematics, my students build an algebraic model that describes the effects of a rolling ball's (perpendicular) collision with a wall. The goal is for the model to predict the ball's velocity when it returns to a fixed point approximately 50-100 cm from the wall as a function of its velocity as it passes…

Instructional design can be more effective if it is as fixedly dedicated to the accommodation of individual differences as it currently is to the accommodation of subject matters. That is the hypothesis. A menu of accommodation options is provided that is applicable at each of three stages of instructional development or administration: before,…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

The methods and models for categorical data analysis cover considerable ground, ranging from regression-type models for binary and binomial data, count data, to ordered and unordered polytomous variables, as well as regression models that mix qualitative and continuous data. This article focuses on methods for binary or binomial data, which are…

Algebraic solving ability had been discussed by many educators and researchers. There exists no definite definition for algebraic solving ability as it can be viewed from different perspectives. In this paper, the nature of algebraic solving ability in terms of algebraic processes that demonstrate the ability in solving algebraic problem is…

A wealth of empirical evidence has now accumulated concerning animals' categorizing photographs of real-world objects. Although these complex stimuli have the advantage of fostering rapid category learning, they are difficult to manipulate experimentally and to represent in formal models of behavior. We present a solution to the representation…

In this paper, we introduce logic programming as a domain that exhibits some characteristics of being ill-defined. In order to diagnose student errors in such a domain, we need a means to hypothesise the student's intention, that is the strategy underlying her solution. This is achieved by weighting constraints, so that hypotheses about solution…

Researchers often compare the relationship between an outcome and covariate for two or more groups by evaluating whether the fitted regression curves differ significantly. When they do, researchers need to determine the "significance region," or the values of the covariate where the curves significantly differ. In analysis of covariance (ANCOVA),…

The extensive computational and formatting capabilities of today's spreadsheets enable users to create sophisticated analytical models with professionally formatted outputs. But good-looking reports can mask a host of input errors, formula mistakes, and computational problems. This article examines the subject of spreadsheet error detection in…