Middle

Touchscreen-based smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, offer great promise for providing blind and visually-impaired (BVI) users with a means for accessing graphics non-visually. However, they also offer novel challenges as they were primarily developed for use as a visual interface. This paper studies key usability parameters governing accurate rendering of haptically-perceivable graphical materials.

Significance: Touchscreen-based, multimodal graphics represent an area of increasing research in digital access for individuals with blindness or visual impairments; yet, little empirical research on the effects of screen size on graphical exploration exists. This work probes if and whenmore screen area is necessary in supporting a patternmatching task.

Significance: Touchscreen-based, multimodal graphics represent an area of increasing research in digital access for individuals with blindness or visual impairments; yet, little empirical research on the effects of screen size on graphical exploration exists. This work probes if and whenmore screen area is necessary in supporting a patternmatching task.

Documenting how students with learning disabilities (LD) initially conceive of fractional quantities, and how their understandings may align with or differ from students with mathematics difficulties, is necessary to guide development of assessments and interventions that attach to unique ways of thinking or inherent difficulties these students may face understanding fraction concepts. One way to characterize such conceptions is through the creation of a framework that depicts key understandings evidenced as students work with problematic situations.

Anticipating and responding to learner variability can make using talk moves complex. The authors fuse Universal Design for Learning (UDL), differentiation, and talk moves into three key planning and pedagogy considerations.

Hunt, J. H., MacDonald, B., Lambert, R., Sugita, T., & Silva, J. (2018). Think, pair, show, share to increase classroom discourse. Teaching Children Mathematics (Focus Issue-Invited contribution), 25(2), 80-84.

This study sheds light on three teaching competencies: Pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) professional noticing of student mathematical reasoning and strategies, their ability to assess the validity of student reasoning and strategies, and to select student strategy for class discussion. Our results reveal that PSTs with strong awareness of mathematically significant aspects of student reasoning and strategies (focused noticing) were better positioned to assess the validity of student reasoning and strategies.

Ensuring that all students, including English language learners (ELLs) who speak English as a second language, succeed in science is more challenging with a shift towards learning through language-intensive science practices suggested by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Interactive visualization technologies have the potential to support science learning for all students, including ELLs, by providing explicit representations of unobservable scientific systems.

This column provides how-to strategies and practical advice for the science teacher. A resource for integrating argumentation into your science classroom.

González-Howard, M., Marco-Bujosa, L., McNeill, K. L., Goss, M., & Loper, S. (2018). Teacher’s Toolkit: The Argumentation Toolkit. Science Scope.