Integration of Technology, Curriculum, and Professional Development for Advancing Middle School Mathematics: Three Large-Scale Studies
The authors present three studies (two randomized controlled experiments and one embedded quasi-experiment) designed to evaluate the impact of replacement units targeting student learning of advanced middle school mathematics. The studies evaluated the SimCalc approach, which integrates an interactive representational technology, paper curriculum, and teacher professional development. Each study addressed both replicability of findings and robustness across Texas settings, with varied teacher characteristics (backgrounds, knowledge, attitudes) and student characteristics (demographics, levels of prior mathematics knowledge). Analyses revealed statistically significant main effects, with student-level effect sizes of .63, .50, and .56. These consistent gains support the conclusion that SimCalc is effective in enabling a wide variety of teachers in a diversity of settings to extend student learning to more advanced mathematics.
This review of articles published in the South African Journal of Psychology over the past 10 years includes analyses of themes, theoretical versus review contributions, and statistical techniques used in research articles. It was found that a fair range of themes was covered, with topics relating to clinical/counselling psychology, developmental psychology and personality psychology receiving most attention. Comparatively few articles dealt with theory development. In research contributions the use of basic statistical techniques was clearly favoured above more sophisticated methods of data analysis. No significant changes in the use of statistical techniques occurred over the past 10 years. The results were compared with similar analyses of American journals and general implications of the findings are discussed.