Bringing Math to Life: Provide Students Opportunities to Connect their Lives to Math

Math journals provide students with opportunities to articulate their understanding of math concepts and/or their frustrations with the gaps in those understandings. Their use supports metacognitive thinking to enhance understanding and application. This study took a look at the use of math journals by fourth grade students as a conduit for critical thinking, reflection, and real world math application. For this study, student journal entries consisted of identification of a real-life event, the use of a problem-solving strategy learned during class instruction, narrative of both the problem’s description as well as the rationale for choosing the problem, and the use of a numeric or pictorial model with solution. Students shared his/her journal entry with the entire class. Through this research, I witnessed evidence of growth in mathematical understanding, computing and a deeper connection to math’s many real-life applications in the lives of elementary students

Verbal Learning and Memory Deficits across Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Insights from an ENIGMA Mega Analysis.

Deficits in memory performance have been linked to a wide range of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. While many studies have assessed the memory impacts of individual conditions, this study considers a broader perspective by evaluating how memory recall is differentially associated with nine common neuropsychiatric conditions using data drawn from 55 international studies, aggregating 15,883 unique participants aged 15–90. The effects of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, stroke, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder on immediate, short-, and long-delay verbal learning and memory (VLM) scores were estimated relative to matched healthy individuals. Random forest models identified age, years of education, and site as important VLM covariates. A Bayesian harmonization approach was used to isolate and remove site effects. Regression estimated the adjusted association of each clinical group with VLM scores. Memory deficits were strongly associated with dementia and schizophrenia (p \u3c 0.001), while neither depression nor ADHD showed consistent associations with VLM scores (p \u3e 0.05). Differences associated with clinical conditions were larger for longer delayed recall duration items. By comparing VLM across clinical conditions, this study provides a foundation for enhanced diagnostic precision and offers new insights into disease management of comorbid disorders