In this paper, we report on how teachers in Higher Education enact policy. Outcome-based education (OBE) serves as an example of a governmental educational policy introduced with the European Bologna reform. With a hermeneutic approach, we have studied how 14 teachers interpreted this policy and re-designed their courses. The findings show…

Research suggests that there are two major reasons for the low numbers taking Higher Level mathematics in Ireland: namely, ineffective teaching and a subsequent lack of student interest in the subject. Traditional styles of teaching make it difficult for students to take an interest in a confusing topic in which they can see no immediate…

Linear algebra is a basic mathematical subject taught in mathematics and science depar-tments of universities. The teaching and learning of this course has always been difficult. This study aims to contribute to the research in linear algebra education, focusing on linear dependence and independence concepts. This was done by introducing…

This study investigates interactions between calculus learning and problem-solving in the context of two first-semester undergraduate calculus courses in the USA. We assessed students' problem-solving abilities in a common US calculus course design that included traditional lecture and assessment with problem-solving-oriented labs. We…

Debates about how undergraduate mathematics should be taught are informed by different views of what it is to learn and to do mathematics. In this qualitative study 10 students enrolled in an advanced undergraduate course in mathematics shared their views about how they best learn mathematics. After participating in a semester-long course in…

The image of mathematics held by Irish post-primary students was examined and a model for the image found was constructed. Initially, a definition for "image of mathematics" was adopted with image of mathematics hypothesized as comprising attitudes, beliefs, self-concept, motivation, emotions and past experiences of mathematics. Research…

The changes in academic identity a teacher may undergo, as they modify their teaching practice, will vary depending on their experiences and the support they receive. In this paper, we describe the shifts in academic identity of two lecturers, a mathematician and a mathematics educator, as they both made changes to their teaching practice by…

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational…

Readers' objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers…

We investigated changes across grades in the cognitive demands associated with the organizing subprocess of writing. A total of 85 fifth (age M = 10.8), 88 seventh (age M = 12.9), and 79 ninth (age M = 14.6) graders composed either a procedural text or an expository description on a digital tablet, on the basis of a "scrambled ideas"…

This article reports instruction supporting the development of fifth grade English learners' argumentative writing in an English language arts setting. Arguments analyzed for the study were produced by the same students on two occasions, roughly 3 months apart. In the first instance, students discussed the source text in detail, but were…

Scott Hamilton is the Forrest Gump of education reform, although with a lot more IQ points and fewer chocolates. He worked for Bill Bennett in the U.S. Department of Education and for Benno Schmidt at the Edison Project. He authorized charter schools in Massachusetts, co-founded the KIPP network, quadrupled the size of Teach For America (TFA), and…

The primary objective of this study was to examine the effect of missing data on goodness of fit statistics in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). For this aim, four missing data handling methods; listwise deletion, full information maximum likelihood, regression imputation and expectation maximization (EM) imputation were examined in terms of…

While heads were spinning, policy watchers seemed genuinely perplexed by New York City's Mayor de Blasio's education opinions. De Blasio opposed many of Bloomberg's reform efforts despite the achievement gains realized by the nation's largest school district during the last 12 years. Yet on close reading, de Blasio's…

In this research, it was aimed to analyze the classroom teachers' level of creating a constructivist learning environment in terms of various variables. For that purpose, relational screening model was used in the research. Classroom teachers' level of creating a constructivist learning environment was determined using the…