Early critical thinking and sustainability awareness development is crucial for equipping future generations to handle global issues in an increasingly complicated and interconnected society. This study examined how 9-year-old primary school students applied their knowledge through a collaborative Mystery assignment, demonstrating a Thinking Skill…

Students with mathematics difficulty, especially students with disabilities and emergent bilinguals, require careful consideration during word-problem instruction. Word problems that include relational terms such as more but are not easily solved using the implied operation (i.e., addition) can be particularly challenging. First, we summarize a…

Although children learn more when teachers gesture, it is not clear "how" gesture supports learning. Here, we sought to investigate the nature of the memory processes that underlie the observed benefits of gesture on lasting learning. We hypothesized that instruction with gesture might create memory representations that are particularly…

Determining the most effective ways to support student-to-student talk requires some negotiating from a responsive teacher. This paper reports on a case study of two emergent multilingual students in Grade 3 (seven to eight-year-olds) who explained their strategies to each other. The transcript of their conversation was analysed using Chan and…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe the statistical arguments produced by third-grade students (8-9 years old) and to identify the teaching support for collective argumentation in a lesson based on data comparison. A Lesson Study Group researched and planned the lesson around a problem from the official mathematics textbook.…

An understanding of how sensemaking unfolds when elementary students engage in engineering design tasks is crucial to advancing engineering teaching and learning at K-12 levels. Sensemaking has been widely studied in the context of science as a discipline. In this paper, we seek to contribute to the more nascent efforts to build theory about the…

Mathematical modeling involves using mathematics to represent, analyze, and make predictions or decisions about real- world situations. Garfunkel and Montgomery (2016) elaborate on six components of the mathematical modeling process, including identifying the problem, making assumptions and identifying variables, doing the math, analyzing and…

Mathematical word problems present various challenges for students, including English learners. Research on word problem-solving interventions for elementary English learners with or at risk for mathematics disabilities/difficulties was reviewed. A systematic search of studies conducted between 2012 and 2022 yielded a total of 14 research studies…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers recognize that student participation in classroom mathematics conversations, especially explaining one's own thinking and engaging with others' ideas, can promote students' mathematics learning. However, precisely "how" participating in these ways supports learning has not often been examined in…

A solid foundation in mathematics is beneficial not only for individuals' concurrent and later academic achievement, but also for future career success and financial stability. Rational number knowledge plays a pivotal role in mathematical success, yet it is often regarded as a challenging area to grasp comprehensively. The dissertation aims to…

Problem-solving is a key aspect of mathematics instruction. Although it is part of several national curricula, its implementation is still being vastly explored. The present research, which is part of a larger project, aimed to investigate the effect of using problem-oriented instruction in grade 3 of primary school on students' mathematical…

Mathematics instruction can work to open or constrain children's opportunities to learn, and the busy, interactive nature of instruction makes it challenging for researchers to identify patterns in high-quality opportunities to learn. While researchers have documented how whole-group discussions and small-group work can contribute to such…

There is a growing awareness that many children are not developing fast and accurate retrieval-based strategies for solving single-digit addition problems. In this study we individually assessed 166 third and fourth grade children to identify a group of children (called accurate-min-counters) who frequently solved simple single-digit addition…

In this paper, the multidigit arithmetic-related strategy adaptivity, strategy flexibility and solution accuracy of Danish compulsory school students is examined. Participants, 749 grade three, 731 grade six and 818 grade eight, were drawn from twenty demographically different schools. Drawing on a tri-phase assessment tool, each student completed…

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…