Insights on students' own authentic design practices--nascent design practices without much adult guidance--are crucial to informing responsive facilitation of engineering design tasks. This study unpacks how elementary students interpret teacher given information about a design task, and interact with each other and given resources, to traverse a…

Students' understanding of the meaning of the equal sign develops slowly over the primary grades. In addition to updating their representations of equations to recognize that the equal sign represents an equivalence relation rather than signaling an operation, students need to move beyond full computation to efficiently solve equivalence problems.…

National mathematics achievement results show that elementary students in the United States are not increasing in cognitive ability or critical thinking skills (NAEP, 2020). For this increase, mathematically promising students require more opportunities for cognitively demanding mathematics instruction. As a result, this descriptive study focused…

The relationships between visuo-spatial abilities and geometry performances in school-aged children were examined. A battery of tests assessing non-verbal reasoning, visuo-spatial mental imagery, and academic achievement in geometry (i.e., geometric knowledge and geometric problem-solving competencies) was presented to 162 8-9.5-year-old pupils…

Research has demonstrated strong relations between spatial skill and mathematics across ages and in both typical and atypical populations, suggesting that a significant proportion of variance in mathematics performance can be explained by variance in spatial skill. Why do these relations exist and how do they develop? Studies of dimensionality in…

In a previous study, Mix et al. (2016) reported that spatial skill and mathematics were composed of 2 highly correlated, domain-specific factors, with a few cross-domain loadings. The overall structure was consistent across grade (kindergarten, 3rd grade, 6th grade), but the cross-domain loadings varied with age. The present study sought to…

In the present research, we provide empirical evidence for the process of symbolic integration of number associations, focusing on the development of simple addition (e.g., 5 + 3 = 8), subtraction (e.g., 5 - 3 = 2), and multiplication (e.g., 5 × 3 = 15). Canadian children were assessed twice, in Grade 2 and Grade 3 (N = 244; 55% girls). All…

This study established an online game-based assessment to explore third and fourth graders' performance of computational estimation in addition and subtraction. Students' computational estimation strategies could be automatically recorded and classified in this assessment, and the Higher-Order DINA model was used as a measurement model in order to…

Problem solving has been a core theme in education for several decades. Educators and policy makers agree on the importance of the role of problem solving skills for school and real life success. A primary purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive abilities on mathematical problem solving performance of elementary…

Low-income and racial/ethnic minority children are at increased risk of experiencing summer reading loss or declined reading levels due to time away from school. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a 6-week summer reading program would help children maintain or improve reading levels. Four-hundred-fourteen African American and…

Literature suggests that drawing has an important role in the development of learning and thinking skills and the communication of ideas. However, the role and use of drawing by young learners within the process of designing is poorly understood. Working with 22 Grade 3 learners from a well-resourced school in KwaZulu-Natal, this study sought to…

Introduction: This study has aimed to investigate the relationship between the development of working memory and performance on arithmetic activities. Method: We conducted a 3-year longitudinal study of a sample of 90 children, that was followed during the first, second and third year of primary school. All children were tested on measures of WM…

The involvement of working memory (WM) was examined in two types of mental calculation tasks: exact and approximate. Specifically, children attending Grades 3 and 4 of primary school were involved in three experiments that examined the role of verbal and visuospatial WM in solving addition problems presented in vertical or horizontal format. For…

Background: Despite doubts voiced on their efficacy, a series of studies has been carried out on the capacity of training programmes to improve academic and reasoning skills by focusing on underlying cognitive abilities and working memory in particular. No systematic efforts have been made, however, to test training programmes that involve both…

Math achievement is not a unidimensional construct but includes different skills that require different cognitive abilities. The focus of this study was to examine associations between a number of cognitive abilities and three domains of math skills (knowing, applying and problem solving) simultaneously in a multivariate framework. Participants…