There is growing evidence that the ability to perceive structure is essential for students' mathematical development. Looking at students' structure sense in basic numerical and patterning tasks seems promising for understanding how these tasks set the foundation for the development of later mathematical skills. Previous studies have shown how…

The paper presents an analysis of elementary grade mathematics teaching in India focusing on mathematical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning is an important tool to make sense of mathematical ideas, which in turn makes mathematics more accessible to learners and promotes social equality. The paper analyzes 112 lessons from Grades 1 to 8 by 21…

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…

Learning to calculate with natural numbers by structuring seems promising but how this can be taught in a sustainable manner remains an open question. An eight-month-long intervention based on the idea of using a structural approach to addition and subtraction, and particularly bridging through ten, was implemented in four Swedish first-grade…

We are developing an approach to teaching important proportionality-based concepts to first grade students in a way that supports students' future progress in the domain. We consider the proportionality between magnitudes as a basic relationship behind multiple cases, usually described mathematically as ratio or rate. The core of our strategy is…

When language is defined narrowly in mathematics classrooms, racially and linguistically minoritized students in classrooms could be systematically positioned as "learners of deficiency." Recent scholarship calls for expanding the notion of language to emphasize embodied expression of mathematical ideas. Taking a critical perspective to…

Recent research suggests that children in elementary grades have some facility with variable and variable notation in ways that warrant closer attention. We report here on an empirically developed progression in first-grade children's thinking about these concepts in functional relationships. Using learning trajectories research as a framework for…

Educators and several national standards highlight the role that problem solving should play in students' mathematics education: problem solving is recognized as one of the most significant activities of doing mathematics. From the research point of view, nowadays, it is well established that cognitive and affective factors come into play in…

At the start of mathematics education children are often presented with addition and subtraction problems in the form of pictures. They are asked to solve the problems by filling in corresponding number sentences. One type of problem concerns the representation of an increase or a decrease in a depicted amount. A decrease is, however, more…

This paper draws on data from a first grade multilingual mathematics classroom in Sweden. I explore how students' agency is pronounced in the classroom that actually can be a site where mathematics reform-oriented pedagogy thrives and how the emphasis on language support in such classrooms can support reform-oriented pedagogy. I argue that the…

The researchers in this study investigated the impact of mathematics-focused parental involvement on Kindergarten to Grade 8 children and parents as well as factors prompting that impact. Qualitative analysis consisting of parent, child, and teacher interviews and 3-year quantitative testing showed significant improvements in students' mathematics…

This paper deals with one aspect of the endeavor to generate a theory of the development of mathematical thinking of children in the early years ages 3 to 10. By comparing two scenes, one from preschool and one from a first grade mathematics class, the relationship between diagrammatic and narrative argumentations among children and teachers is…

This paper argues for a renewed focus on statistical reasoning in the beginning school years, with opportunities for children to engage in data modelling. Results are reported from the first year of a 3-year longitudinal study in which three classes of first-grade children (6-year-olds) and their teachers engaged in data modelling activities. The…