The Effectiveness of the Enrichment Program in Sixth Grade Math and Science Classes A.Navidi, Ph.D. To improve students' learning in math and science enrichment programs have been introduced, yet their effectiveness has never been assessed. To this end, a large sample of administrators, teachers, and students were questioned and tested, while 46 class sessions were also observed. Over 400...

There is accumulating evidence that genetic influences on achievement are more pronounced among children living in higher socioeconomic status homes, and that these gene-by-environment interactions occur prior to children's entry into formal schooling. We hypothesized that one pathway through which socioeconomic status promotes genetic influences on early achievement is by facilitating the proc...

The paper presents the authors’ experience in stimulating the synergy of disciplines via active learning methods; the emphasis being on project based learning. Promoting this method is demonstrated in the context of teachers’ training courses and developing a set of IT textbooks. Numerous examples are presented showing that the synergy of various disciplines is quite natural when integrating th...

OBJECTIVE Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), resulting from maternal alcohol use during pregnancy, are associated with significant academic and behavior problems. Although affected children are common in clinical practice, information to guide recommendations about interventions with this high risk group is very limited. This study evaluated the persistence of effects of an intervention o...

Spatial thinking skills positively relate to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) outcomes, but spatial training is largely absent in elementary school. Elementary school is a time when children develop foundational cognitive skills that will support STEM learning throughout their education. Spatial thinking should be considered a foundational cognitive skill. The present research ...

Teachers’ anxiety about an academic domain, such as math, can impact students’ learning in that domain. We asked whether this relation held in the domain of spatial skill, given the importance of spatial skill for success in math and science and its malleability at a young age. We measured 1stand 2nd-grade teachers’ spatial anxiety (N= 19) and students’ spatial skill (N= 132). Teachers’ spatial...

Math is usually taught using a lot of words. But, is this the way the human brain learns math? We studied how math is related to memory, intelligence, and reading in 7-year-old children. We found that memory for visual information (things you can see) and spatial information (where things are located in relationship to each other) is related to math skills more than memory for words and verbal ...

This study explored the relationship between students’ math ability and effort in predicting 6 grade students’ performance in the Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS) system. The students were clustered into four groups by Kmeans: high ability high effort, high ability low effort, low ability high effort and low ability low effort. A one-way ANOVA indicated that student’s math po...

Recent theory and research suggest that certain situational factors can harm women’s math test performance. The three studies presented here indicate that female role models can buffer women’s math test performance from the debilitating effects of these situational factors. In Study 1, women’s math test performance was protected when a competent female experimenter (i.e., a female role model) a...