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This paper describes application of innovative practice and procedures in relationship to recognized principles and theory of adult education used in college math instruction. Adult learning principles provide the theoretical constructs and foundation of the practice supporting a learner-centered approach to learning. The purpose was to explore the needs of learners and the learning contexts that would help them achieve higher dimensions of critical thinking and cognitive development. Based on Knowles' six assumptions of andragogy, curriculum was designed to provide college math students meaningful learning experiences, critical thinking skills, and application within the context of the classroom. Creativity and hands-on learning proved to be beneficial not only to tactile and kinesthetic learners but to others in the classrooms as well. Additionally, math anxiety is addressed and how such anxiety can and does have a debilitating impact on learning math in the classroom. Using adult learning principles and best practices in undergraduate math education, keys to opening the door for student success are application, recognizing math anxiety in students, creativity, hands on learning, and incorporating characteristics of effective teachers.

The Cape Canaveral Peninsula is the largest Holocene coastal sand deposit composed of beach ridges on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is composed of 16 beach-ridge sets that are separated by erosional surfaces. Despite its prominence as a Holocene coastal depocenter, there are a limited amount of chronological data constraining the timing of its formation. In this study, we apply optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating on sand-sized quartz and radiocarbon dating on individual marine shells to develop a refined chronology of the Cape Canaveral beach-ridge plain with particular focus on constraining the depositional age of the northwesterly-most, and geographically oldest, beach-ridge set on the peninsula. We obtain an average OSL age of 5680 ± 240 years (n = 4) for the initiation of coastal deposition at Cape Canaveral. The new ages, and the organization of beach ridges into 16 distinct sets indicates that the Cape Canaveral beach-ridge plain experienced an ~5700-year history of alternating deposition and erosion, with 75% of present-day Cape Canaveral (Beach-ridge Sets 5–16) deposited over the past 2000 years and Beach-ridge Sets 8–16 comprising 50% of the area over the past 1000 years. Because the minimum swale elevations of the ~5700-year Beach-ridge Set 1, and those of all the younger beach-ridge sets, are within several decimeters of present-day mean higher high water, we hypothesize that all the beach ridges present at Cape Canaveral could have been deposited at or within decimeters of present-day sea level. There is no evidence for Holocene "highstand" events over the past 5700 years in the published sea level curves from northeast and south Florida, which are based on subsurface estuarine foraminifera/leaf litter and mangrove peat data, respectively. This dichotomy illustrates the need to integrate both subaerial and subsurface data to produce a more realistic Holocene sea-level curve for the southeastern United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soda Lake is a basaltic Holocene maar located in northwestern Nevada, USA. A maximum age of ~10 ka is currently the best age constraint for the eruption given that the eruptive deposits cover lake sediments of pluvial Lake Lahontan. We apply optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to feldspar and quartz of xenocrystic origin to define the eruption age for Soda Lake. Fading corrected IR50 and non-fading corrected post-IRIR225 ages from xenocrystic feldspar are statistically indistinguishable, yielding an average age of ~5.5 ka for the Soda Lake maar eruption. The quartz OSL signal was dominated by medium and slow components leading to significant age underestimation relative to the feldspar extracts. This new eruption age provides valuable information for risk assessment and hazard mitigation in northern Nevada. We also present some preliminary results on an exploratory application of luminescence dating to xenoliths extracted from juvenile basaltic bombs and the potential for luminescence to provide constraints on magma thermal dynamics and ascent history.r eruption (Nevada, USA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how luminescence signals imprinted on fluvial sediments vary depending on the depositional environment and vary through time in the same river. We collected sediment samples from four geomorphically distinct locations on the modern floodplain and modern point bar on the Buffalo River in northwest Arkansas, USA, in order to determine if different depositional environments are associated with distinct bleaching characteristics in the sediments. Our analysis revealed that all samples from different depositional environments yielded ages consistent with modern deposition. The samples collected from the floodplain and bar head contained a higher proportion of grains with residual doses, indicative of incomplete bleaching during transport, while samples from the mid‐bar and bar tail appeared well bleached. Our results are particularly intriguing for two significant reasons. First, they highlight distinct equivalent dose distributions in different depositional environments. Second, they shed light on an intriguing relationship: despite generally well‐bleached modern floodplain samples, ancient sediments from corresponding terraces displayed equivalent dose (De) distributions that suggest partial bleaching in some cases. This research contributes to the growing body of work that seeks to establish a relationship between luminescence properties and sediment transport processes and offers valuable insight into how luminescence signals vary locally in modern fluvial deposits, which can help guide the interpretation of older fluvial deposits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]