In 1988, a national survey was conducted by the Center for the Study of Community Colleges to assess the needs of two-year colleges for faculty, equipment, and facilities for science, social science, mathematics, engineering, and science-based technology programs, and to identify innovative programs for recruiting students into these programs.…

The tendency of female students to avoid mathematics and science courses has been of concern to many researchers. The concern stems from the fact that avoidance of these academic areas places young women in a position of reduced choice with respect to careers. This research examined mathematics and science related attitudes and behaviors among…

This project identified over 500 critical incidents of successful and unsuccessful instruction in science and mathematics courses reported through interviews of 105 blind college students. The principal categories of effective teacher behavior included planned concrete learning experiences, creative use of learning materials, and detailed…

Problem solving is viewed as an increasing area of interest that focuses on the theory, research, and teaching of general cognitive skills which are applicable to broad problem classes. This document gives an overview of some important aspects of the theory and research in order to identify what general cognitive skills ought to be taught. Modern…

The transcripts of 8,873 students, representing 7% of the enrollments in the Los Angeles Community College District, were examined to determine course participation and completion rates in science. Six curricular areas were investigated: (1) agriculture; (2) biological sciences; (3) engineering; (4) mathematics and computer science; (5) physical…

For several semesters, the teaching staff of the administrative statistics course at The University of Massachusetts have engaged in "acceptance testing"--the screening of incoming students for some very basic skills with an open book, unlimited time, repeatable test. Test results demonstrated that successful completion of prerequisite…

For this survey of collegiate programs preparing students for certification as secondary school mathematics teachers, questionnaires were sent to the 53 Illinois institutions listed as having approved programs. Responses were received from 28 schools. The questionnaire was designed to yield information concerning criteria for admission to, and…

This study examined factors predicting the enrollment of men and women in science, math, and engineering (SME) graduate programs among those who had earned SME Bachelor's degrees. The data, which covered a 9-year period: 1985, 1989 (4-year follow-up), and 1994 (9-year follow-up), was drawn from the Cooperative Institutional Research program, a…

As the pedagogical-effectiveness of information technology (IT) in mathematics education is carefully established the topic of discourse among mathematicians and mathematics educators is no longer a dispute about whether or not to use IT in the teaching and learning of mathematics but a shift to some debate about the when and how of its usage.…

Research among college students has shown that the study of mathematics generates anxiety reactions among students who are not necessarily highly anxious in other situations. Because high levels of anxiety can devastate a student's ability to perform, a math anxiety workshop was field tested in 1993 at the Mohave Valley Campus of the Mohave…

Mathematical word problems are notoriously difficult to solve for students at all grade levels. Performance deficiencies have been attributed to students lacking abstract logico-mathematical knowledge or to insufficiently developed language comprehension skills. At least four general sources of difficulty can be distinguished in mathematical word…

This document asserts that mathematics is becoming essential to many more disciplines. The paper is an attempt to describe the sorts of curricular changes which many mathematics educators are now recommending. The paper discusses: (1) mathematical power; (2) mathematics instruction; (3) new research directions; (4) mathematical thinking and…

This study examined whether analogy or means-ends strategies (heuristics) would be used to solve geometric puzzle-like problems, which were generated by a microcomputer. The subjects in the two-group experiment were undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course at Potsdam College (New York). One group of subjects learned…

Deciding how to approach a word problem for solution is a critical stage of problem solving, and is the stage which frequently presents considerable difficulty for novices. Do novices use the same information that experts do in deciding that two problems would be solved similarly? This set of four studies indicates that novices rely more on…

Predictor variables that could be used effectively to place entering freshmen methematics students into courses of instruction in mathematics were investigated at West Virginia University. Multiple discriminant analysis was used with nearly 6,000 student records collected over a three-year period, and a series of predictive equations were…