A discrepant event is a happening contrary to our current beliefs. Discrepant events are said to be useful in clarifying concepts. This is one of the interesting features of current theories of constructivism. The story of Mpemba's ice cream is quite well known, but it is the educational aspects of the experiment that are of interest in this…

The presentations address a variety of difficulties occurring in students' solutions of equations and inequalities, and suggest different reasons for these difficulties. When analyzing students' performances, [BB] and [TTT] mention students' tendencies to make irrelevant connections between equations and inequalities as a problematic phenomenon.…

Based on psychological approaches that evoke mental representations through verbal and visual cues, this paper investigates the different kinds of mental representations projected by 8 to 11 year old children of identified arithmetical achievement when responding to verbal and visual stimuli associated with fractions. It examines how the visual…

The Malaysian educational system tends to take a clear instructionally-focused approach to the teaching of mathematics. This means that many students gain a good procedural command of areas of mathematics. This paper explores one outcome of a teaching experiment in which one area of mathematics (differentiation) was taught in a radically different…

In our investigation of preservice secondary teachers' understanding of irrational numbers we focus on how different representations influence participants' responses with respect to irrationality. As a theoretical perspective we use the distinction between transparent and opaque representations, that is, representations that "show"…

This research report presents a study of the work of agronomy majors in which an extension of linear models to non-linear contexts can be observed. By linear models we mean the model y=a.x+b, some particular representations of direct proportionality and the diagram for the rule of three. Its presence and persistence in different types of problems…

In this work we show some activities designed with a First Year group of the Mathematics Degree to give the graphic register back its mathematical status and promote its use on the part of the students. In particular, we have chosen the topic related to improper integration to reinforce the use of this register by the students. [For complete…

Mediational models predicting college students' adjustment were tested using regression analyses. Contemporary adult attachment theory was employed to explore the cognitive/affective mechanisms by which adult attachment and perfectionism affect various aspects of psychological functioning. Consistent with theoretical expectations, results…

Metacognition, literally thinking about thinking, is a term used by cognitive psychologists to refer to our ability to monitor our own performance on cognitive tasks. The term also addresses the ability to assess level of knowledge and skill in a given domain. Behavioral and psychological researchers frequently solicit metacognitive judgments from…

This study investigated the effects of reading extremely violent versus nonviolent comic books on 249 introductory psychology students' interpretations of overt and relational provocation situations. After reading their assigned comic books, participants read hypothetical stories in which an overt or relational aggression occurred, but the intent…

This study of creative genius argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. The book draws on the latest…

This paper presents a study that analyzed the ways in which community college presidents define and disseminate information on institutional and organizational change. It identifies three courses of change on community college campuses: presidential initiatives, internal pressures, and external pressures. The study centered on the presidents'…

In this communication we analyze a dichotomy that pervades research on attitude in mathematics education: the classification of attitude as positive/negative. After highlighting the ambiguity of the term "positive", and some problems related to it, we suggest that the positive/negative dichotomy is too simplistic to take into account the deep…

The fundamental question in creating coding categories for an open-ended questionnaire is how to transform a complete transcript into manageable pieces of data. This paper describes the methodology involved in coding qualitative data derived from an evaluation of the Cognitive Approaches to School Leadership (CASL) program. The first task was to…

This paper addresses the contributions that brain research makes to education. Topics pertaining to typical brain research findings and their educational significance, caution in the application of findings to explain differences by population, and the types of research that could be potentially helpful to educators are discussed. Among the…