Understanding contingency table analysis is a facet of mathematical competence in the domain of data and probability. Previous studies have shown that even young children are able to solve specific contingency table problems, but apply a variety of strategies that are actually invalid. The purpose of this paper is to describe primary school…

Decision making during instruction that is responsive to children's mathematical thinking is examined reflexively by the researcher in the context of teaching second graders. Focus is on exploring how the research base on learning informs teaching decisions that are oriented to building on children's sound conceptions. The development of four…

The intention of the present study is to know how the pupils can learn to make a group of ten to understand the idea of unitizing. The pupils were given a contextual problem "Counting the Beads" in order to promote their understanding about the idea of unitizing. The process of designing the problem was based on the 5 tenets of…

In Singapore, primary school students are taught to use bar diagrams to represent known and unknown values in algebraic word problems. However, little is known about students' understanding of these graphical representations. We investigated whether students use and think of the bar diagrams in a concrete or a more abstract fashion. We also…

Mathematics concepts are most often taught using auditory, sequential instructional methods. Not only are these methods ineffective when used with visual-spatial learners, they may be detrimental to both academic and emotional progress. Ways in which visual-spatial learners process information are explained. One child's story is presented,…

Recently, the author has been fortunate to be a visitor in a number of classrooms in the United States, England and Europe. On one such visit to an Elementary School in Columbia, Missouri, the teachers accepted him into their normal classrooms for their normal lessons. He moved between three classes: Grade 1, Grade 2 and Grade 4. A snapshot…

One mathematics lesson was planned by two Grade 2 teachers together. Their separate teaching of it was videotaped, and each teacher was interviewed before and after her lesson. The "same" lesson resulted in different sets of worthwhile learning outcomes. In this research report, the notion of situated cognition is used as a tool for analysis of…