Presents an excerpt from Katherine Neville's best-selling novel "The Eight," and discusses how the excerpt could be used in a mathematics class. Includes possible class activities and reading and writing assignments. (SR)

Despite their increasing availability on the Internet, networked peer assessment systems (1-5) lack feasible automatic dispatching algorithm of student's assignments and ultimately inhibit the effectiveness of peer assessment. Therefore, this study presents a reviewer dispatching algorithm capable of supporting networked peer assessment system in…

Inspired by his ability to teach algebra to low-income and mostly African American and Latino urban students--and have them outscore the state averages for high-income and Caucasian students on standardized tests--Kadhir "Raja" Rajagopal, the 2011 California Teacher of the Year, provides you with a model for teaching that unleashes the…

Science classrooms in the United States have become more diverse with respect to the variety of languages spoken by students. This qualitative study used ethnographic methods to investigate the discourse and practices of two ninth grade science classrooms. Approximately 44% of students included in the study were designated as English learners. The…

As educators, we have two missions. First, we must serve our students--they are both our customer and our product. Second, we aim to provide the market in general with graduates with relevant skills and knowledge for jobs that have not even been created yet. Given that most students graduating and moving into the workplace are not necessarily…

This study is aimed at investigating students' annotation behaviors and their effects on learning achievement with pre-reading (reading before class) exercises and Web-based sharing mechanisms. An 8-week quasi-experiment was conducted with 125 sixth-grade elementary school students. The study shows the following results. First, a significant…

The use of multimodal learning techniques is becoming more widespread, however, the pedagogical discourse surrounding its implementation into classroom and course design is complicated as these technologies are either demonized or viewed as the panacea for curriculum ills. Educators are faced with unique challenges when investigating how to…

The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend research on task interspersal. The authors investigated whether changes in on-task behavior of two middle school students were functionally related to changes in the relative percentages of easy and difficult items on math worksheets. They found that the participants remained on task longer…

Results from nine experiments were analyzed to evaluate the relationship between relative problem completion rates (RPCR) and judgments of time involving mathematics assignments. For each experiment, control assignments contained only target mathematics computation or word problems. Matched experimental assignments contained similar target…

Much of Debra Matthews' teaching experience has been with apprehensive writers, and while teaching freshman English to primarily nontraditional students, she found that the students were often nervous about the writing process. The students acknowledged that they felt threatened by the evaluation process, and some were intimidated by the writing…

Creating well constructed sentences is challenging for most writers. For less skilled writers, including writers with learning disabilities (LD), it can be even more difficult. These writers generally produce less syntactically complex sentences that contain more grammatical errors. They may also produce sentences that are shorter; have higher…

Educators are often frustrated when students appear not to have completed reading assignments carefully or attentively and seem unwilling or unable to give a fair and balanced critique of what they have read. This essay suggests that incorporating the practice of reading aloud may help both to point out where students are stumbling and to create…

Most college professors are looking for ways to make writing a positive experience for students. This is increasingly a challenge in our contemporary world, which tends to be very image-oriented. This short paper outlines ways in which student writing-projects can be designed encourage critical and innovative thinking in students. Inclusive…

An essential difficulty in solving practical problems that are not like the ones a student has solved before is discerning the core of the problem. It is claimed that discernment has to be trained by variation--by varying the context of the assignments in which students have to identify and grasp their "underlying form". A decisive…

We conducted generalizability studies to examine the extent to which ratings of language arts performance assignments, administered in a large, diverse, urban district to students in second through ninth grades, result in reliable and precise estimates of true student performance. The results highlight three important points when considering the…