Distinguished Visitors from Shanghai

The Shanghai Principal Delegation consisting of ten outstanding school principals from China's largest city, traveled to California in June to study innovative educational practices. Their itinerary brought them to the IMMEX Software Development Lab for morning presentations and hands-on problem-solving simulations. Following the exercises the group analyzed each other’s performances using IMMEX reporting tools. The group performed well on their problem simulations and their analysis was very productive. Other stops on the three week tour included UCLA's campus and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

Journal of Chemical Education

Journal of Chemical Education has published the manuscript entitled An Assessment of the Effect of Collaborative Groups on Students' Problem-Solving Strategies and Abilities in their June 2008, (Volume 85, No. 6, pp. 866-872) issue. This paper reports the use of a suite of software tools and pedagogies to probe the effectiveness of using small group interaction to improve problem solving. Data modeling using artificial neural nets (ANN), hidden Markov modeling (HMM), and item response theory (IRT) is discussed. Authors: Cooper, Melanie M.; Cox, Charles T., Jr.; Nammouz, Minory; Case, Edward; Stevens, Ronald.