This paper describes how the notion of the strongly didactic contract can serve to characterize the teaching adopted to implement a task in probability. It is particularly focused on the reality of mathematical work performed by students and teachers. For this research, classroom sessions were developed in an in-service teacher training course…

The many studies with coin-tossing tasks in literature show that the concept of randomness is challenging for adults as well as children. Systematic errors observed in coin-tossing tasks are often related to the representativeness heuristic, which refers to a mental shortcut that is used to judge randomness by evaluating how well a set of random…

Insight into early precursors of proportional reasoning is necessary to further our theoretical understanding of mathematical development and to guide early interventions. Although several researchers have suggested patterning as a possible precursor for proportional reasoning, there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption,…

Mathematical language (or the content-specific words in mathematics) has repeatedly shown to be related to mathematical abilities in preschool and in the early grades of primary education. Research in this field has predominantly focused on young children's quantitative and spatial language. At the same time, recent research has discovered that…

This paper describes kindergarten children's engagement with two patterning activities. The first activity includes two tasks in which children are asked to choose possible ways for extending two different repeating patterns and the second activity calls for comparing different pairs of repeating patterns. Children's recognition of the unit of…

This study illustrates how a diagnostic testing model can be used to make detailed comparisons between student populations participating in international assessments. The performance of Turkish students on the TIMSS-R mathematics test was reanalyzed with a diagnostic testing model called the Rule Space Model. First, mathematical and cognitive…