This paper describes the author's attempt to design assignments that engage preservice elementary teachers in original mathematical thinking. In particular, the choice of integer operations as the focus of a structured writing assignment that takes students two weeks to complete is explained and justified. Exemplary student work is quoted.…

The rubrics presented in this report represent an evaluation system for objects found within Open Education Resources. An object could include images, applets, lessons, units, assessments and more. For the purpose of this evaluation, any component that can exist as a stand-alone qualifies as an object. The rubrics in this packet can be applied…

Several decades ago, V. A. Krutetskii conducted a multiyear study to investigate the various types of thinking that academically advanced, or as he called them, gifted mathematicians used. Following an in-depth look at Krutetskii's nine ways of thinking, a model is proposed that will provide direction for teachers in selecting problems. The model…

We present a general formula for a triple product involving four real numbers. As a particular case, we get the sum of a triple product of four odd integers. Some interesting results are recovered. We derive a general formula for more than four odd numbers.

The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions for using public speaking tasks in English language teaching (ELT) and to highlight some of their many advantages. For the purpose of this article, the author will focus on two types of these tasks: student presentations and debates. Student presentations may consist of either individual or…

Unit planning is perhaps the most difficult of the teacher duties to execute well. This paper offers suggestions for improving focus and increasing the meaningfulness of thematic unit content for students. Stressing the concept of a Big Understanding, it outlines 6 sequential steps in the creation of units which, when applied, not only establish a…

"It's All About Student Learning Assessing Teacher Candidates' Ability to Impact P-12 Students", provides practical assistance for institutions designing or revising assessment systems or individual assessments for use by units or programs. The publication includes performance assessments currently used by teacher preparation institutions and…

This paper summarizes difficulties that chemistry students at all levels commonly exhibit when translating, manipulating, and interpreting mathematical expressions that contain logarithms, and offers approaches that the authors have found useful to help students overcome such difficulties. The online supplement provides problem sets created by the…

In early 2008 researchers from the University of Melbourne's "New Technologies for Teaching Mathematics" project created a lesson for the Year 10 students at their Victorian research schools. Two important goals of secondary school mathematics education are to build students' conceptual knowledge and to teach students to think…

"Math is language, too," Phyllis and David Whitin (2000) remind everyone in their informative book about reading and writing in the mathematics classroom. This means that students in elementary school math classes are learning two distinct, yet related languages--one of numbers, the other of words. These languages of numbers and words…

For more than twenty years, the Richmond, Virginia Public Schools' program for gifted students has conducted an interscholastic competition similar to the nationally known competition, Destination Imagination. In the featured contest of this yearly event, teams of five students present solutions to engineering problems that they have worked on for…

It is common to find students believing that they have a high skill level in computer use yet this does not normally include proficiency in the use of computer packages for data presentation. This exercise develops team work in data collection, requires the production of a simple spreadsheet, and the exporting of the data from that into one or…

The author of this article, while recently working through some problem sets on determining volumes by triple integrals in cylindrical and spherical coordinate systems, realized that, although the textbook he was using included many interesting problems involving spheres, cylinders and cones and the increasingly complex solids that arose from the…

Another way to divide a line segment discovered by Nathan Besteman is described along with Euclid's and the GLaD construction. The related projects and problems that teachers of geometry can assign to their students are also presented.

An innovative concept of an electronic learning system has been established in an attempt to achieve a technology that provides engineering students with an instructive and affordable framework for learning engineering-related courses. This system utilizes an existing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package, Active Server Pages programming,…