The Magical Number 7

This article describes an interactive activity that involves students participating in a memory recall test. Data collected from the activity may be used to illustrate the one‐sample t test or one‐sample sign test.     

Interest,enjoyment and pride after failure experiences? Predictors of students’ state-emotions after success and failure during learning in mathematics

The current investigation was designed to identify emotion states students experience during mathematics activities, and in particular to distinguish emotions contingent on experiences of success and experiences of failure. Students’ task-related emotional responses were recorded following experiences of success and failure while working with an individualised computer-based mathematics learning environment. In addition, relations between these patterns of emotional responses after success and failure experiences and trait-like motivational variables, self-concept of ability, subject value, orientation to learning from errors, goal orientation and causal attributions, were examined. Two separate studies are reported. In Study 1 emotions associated with success and failure experiences in mathematics were investigated in relation to self-concept of ability, subject value and orientation to learning from errors. In Study 2, patterns of emotion following success and failure were examined in relation to students’ goal orientation and their causal attributions for success in school.     

Face-to-face versus computer-mediated discussion of teaching cases: Impacts on preservice teachers’ engagement, critical analyses, and self-efficacy

Two frequently-used discussion protocols were investigated as part of a program to implement teaching cases in undergraduate educational psychology classes designed for preservice teachers. One protocol involved synchronous face-to-face (FTF) discussion of teaching cases, which occurred in class after students had individually completed written case analyses as homework outside of class. The other was asynchronous computer-mediated (CM) discussion taking place outside of class, simultaneous to students’ completion of their written case analyses. Six class offerings of an undergraduate child development course taught by two instructors (three classes by each instructor) were randomly assigned within instructor in a quasi-experimental design to one of the three discussion conditions: FTF, CM, or no discussion of the cases across the semester. Findings indicated that both CM and FTF discussion conditions were associated with positive outcomes relative to the control condition. Both CM and FTF discussion related to higher cognitive–affective engagement with the cases than the control condition; and the CM discussion condition was associated with higher cognitive–affective engagement than FTF discussion. In contrast, FTF discussion, but not CM discussion, was associated with higher-than-control-condition case analysis ability at the end of the semester. Potential explanations for these findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

Mathematics for teaching and deep subject knowledge: voices of Mathematics Enhancement Course students in England

This article reports an investigation into how students of a mathematics course for prospective secondary mathematics teachers in England talk about the notion of ‘understanding mathematics in depth’, which was an explicit goal of the course. We interviewed eighteen students of the course. Through our social practice frame and in the light of a review of the literature on mathematical knowledge for teaching, we describe three themes that weave through the students’ talk: reasoning, connectedness and being mathematical. We argue that these themes illuminate privileged messages in the course, as well as the boundary and relationship between mathematical and pedagogic content knowledge in secondary mathematics teacher education practice.     

Statewide Initiative to Embed Consumer Health Librarians in Public Libraries: A Case Study

In 2004 a collaborative, statewide outreach project in Delaware was undertaken where consumer health librarians were embedded in public libraries. In order to explore the effect of the embedded librarians on the quality of health information provision, unobtrusive reference visits were made to half of the public libraries in the state. The query “Do vaccines cause autism?” was posed to library staff; resources provided were recorded. In 67 percent of visits, public library staff provided authoritative health information resources. It appears the embedded librarians had a positive residual effect on the provision of authoritative health resources for addressing an ambiguous query.     

Predictors of developmentally appropriate classroom practices in kindergarten through third grade

This study was designed to (a) test the psychometric properties of a new observation measure of developmentally appropriate classroom practices in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, and (b) determine how well classroom and teacher characteristics predict developmentally appropriate classroom practices. Teacher-reported and observational data from 69 classrooms provided support for construct validity, internal consistency, and interrater agreement of the Assessment of Practices in Early Elementary Classrooms (APEEC) measure. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that classroom characteristics (grade, class size, number of children with disabilities), teacher characteristics (education level, years of experience) and teacher beliefs (developmentally appropriate beliefs and developmentally inappropriate beliefs) accounted for 42% of the variance in observed classroom practices. With all variables in the model, teacher education, grade, and beliefs in developmentally appropriate and inappropriate practice accounted for most of the variance in observed classroom practices.