Impact of Active Learning on Mathematical Achievement: an Empirical Study in Saudi Arabia Primary Schools

The research focuses on scientific instructional approaches which take into consideration the impact of such factors as influence and motivation and thus can help provide guidance on practical classroom techniques that can help in fortifying the students’ success in mathematics. The paper investigates ways to achieve better math results among students by stimulating their motivation using active learning paradigm. The study aims to explore the methods of active learning applied in primary school math classes. Our results appear to add to the literature supporting the supposition that active learning has a direct effect on the students’ success and consequently, their achievement. We provide empirical evidence for factors predicting higher math learning achievement, and accordingly, propose an improved student-centered active learning teaching method to help students develop higher-order problem-solving skills, comprising of a combination of previously verified strategies which help to foster a positive attitude towards mathematics.

Process Data in NAEP: Past, Present, and Future

This article reviews how National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has come to collect and analyze data about cognitive and behavioral processes (process data) in the transition to digital assessment technologies over the past two decades. An ordered five-level structure is proposed for describing the uses of process data. The levels in this hierarchy range from ignoring the processes (i.e., counting only the outcomes), to incorporating process data as auxiliary or essential in addition to the outcome, to modeling the process as the outcome itself, either holistically in a rubric score or in a measurement model that accounts for sequential dependencies. Historical examples of these different uses are described as well as recent results using nontraditional analytical approaches. In the final section, speculative future directions incorporating state-of-the-art technologies and analysis methods are described with an eye toward hard-to-measure constructs such as higher order problem-solving and collaboration.

Critical Thinking and Reflective Learning in the Marketing Education Literature: A Historical Perspective and Future Research Needs

Marketing educators have long espoused the importance of critical thinking as a means of developing students’ higher-order problem-solving skills. In this article, we utilize an historical approach to investigate how educators have defined, operationalized, and empirically evaluated the critical thinking construct. To accomplish this, we review the critical thinking literature from three prominent marketing education journals and the leading management education journal. In doing so, we summarize extant critical thinking research across varied pedagogical topics, review empirical findings, and present a conceptual framework for motivating future research.

Teaching Business Ethics

This study examines ethics-related learning outcomes that emerged from an experience-based project in a personal selling and sales management course. Using qualitative research methods, we classified students’ experiences according to domains of ethical issues associated with personal selling and according to conceptualizations of learning identified in the education literature. Patterns we observed in our data suggest that the experience-based project encouraged learners to employ higher-order thinking about business ethics. Higher order problem-solving about ethical issues helps ensure that lessons students learn about ethical decision making carry forward to their professional careers. Based on our findings, we recommend ways instructors can formulate ethics-related learning objectives, develop learning assessments that measure ethics-related learning outcomes, and design teaching and learning activities that help ensure students learn ethical concepts in a way that will carry forward to their careers.

Existence Theory for th Order Nonlocal Integral Boundary Value Problems and Extension to Fractional Case

This paper is devoted to the study of the existence and uniqueness of solutions for th order differential equations with nonlocal integral boundary conditions. Our results are based on a variety of fixed point theorems. Some illustrative examples are discussed. We also discuss the Caputo type fractional analogue of the higher-order problem of ordinary differential equations.

Conclusion

Previous approaches to creativity have often focused on the person or problem domain, as well as the task itself. In this book, we have focused on the task: a difficult problem is one that has no ready solution or even the means to a solution. Some consequences of this perspective are as follows: • Creativity is a matter of degree. The operant question is not “Is this result creative?” but rather “How creative?” • Creativity is a domain-independent concept. An accountant may be creative, as may a shopkeeper or a musician. • All of us face difficult problems from time to time. We may be creative at one point, and uncreative at another. • Creativity involves purposive novelty. Originality or diversity is a necessary component of creativity, but diversity in itself is not a sufficient factor if it does not resolve the referent problem. • As encapsulated in the Multidistance Principle, the solution must incorporate components exhibiting some properties that are distant, and others that are close. • If creativity is a form of higher-order problem solving, itself a cornerstone of general intelligence, then there exist rational approaches to enhancing creative results. • An effective procedure for dealing with difficult problems lies in the Method of Directed Refinement. • Active failure is the highway to success. • Productivity in project managment involves the pursuit of a select number of parallel activities: too few, and efficiency suffers through slack time; too many, and overhead paralyzes productivity. • Our social institutions, including the educational system, encourage conformity— a homogeneity often leading to mediocrity rather than harmony. For each problem of consequence, we should rather seed myriad ideas and cultivate multiple solutions. • Supervision of creative individuals is a delicate affair involving both intervention and insulation. It calls for inspiring action at a distance, without undermining interest nor tainting intrinsic drive. In this book, we have partitioned the components of creativity into five factors: purpose, diversity, relationships, imagery, and externalization. The purpose of the creative effort defines the problem to be resolved.