To be able to support meaningful mathematical experiences, preservice elementary school teachers (PSTs) must learn mathematics in deep and meaningful ways (Ma 1999). They need to experience investigating and making sense of the mathematics they will be called on to teach. To expand their own--often limited--views of what it means to teach and…

This article develops three different types of student explanations and studies how teachers respond to these. The data come from five classrooms at upper grade 5-7 (ages from eleven to thirteen) where all mathematics teaching for one week was filmed. These films were transcribed and student explanations identified. Through a close inspection of…

This study examined how evidence of students' mathematical understanding was influenced by elementary schoolteachers' enactment of instructional practices emphasized during a mathematics professional development program. Videos and field notes were collected during lessons for two teachers from the program and two matched comparison teachers.…

Comparing multiple solutions to a single problem is an important mode for developing flexible mathematical thinking, yet instructionally leading this activity is challenging (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008). We test 1 decision teachers must make after having students solve a problem: whether to only verbally discuss students' solutions or…

Studies have reported that pre-service teachers often enter teacher preparation programs with beliefs and attitudes not conducive to teaching the subject conceptually. In the USA, the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics have brought a renewed focus on procedural and conceptual understanding. However, many U.S. pre-service teachers have…

Many researches revealed that pupils often find difficulties to understand percentage although they are able to recite percent as per hundred and carry out the computations correctly. This might happen due to the way in which the learning percentage has been taught that tends to focus on procedures and recall instead of getting a real…

Thirty preservice teachers enrolled in a field-based science methods course were placed at a public elementary school for coursework and for teaching practice with elementary students. Candidates focused on building conceptual understanding of science content and pedagogical methods through innovative curriculum development and other course…

This study explores the relationships between teacher knowledge, teaching practice, and student learning in mathematics. It extends previous work that developed and evaluated an innovative approach to assessing teacher knowledge based on teachers' analyses of classroom video clips. Teachers watched and commented on 13 fraction clips. These written…

By providing a variety of strategies, scenarios, examples of student writing, classroom video clips from across all science content areas, rubrics, and guidelines for designing assessment items, "Supporting Grade 5-8 Students in Constructing Explanations in Science: The Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning Framework for Talk and Writing" provides…

Students with mathematical learning disabilities (MLDs) experience persistent challenges learning even the most elementary mathematics. While prior research on MLDs has classified students on the basis of test scores and documented performance differences between groups, this dissertation focuses on the qualitative differences in individual…

The research described in this dissertation explores the impact of utilizing a LEGO-robotics integrated engineering and mathematics program to support fifth grade students' learning of ratios and proportion in an extracurricular program. The research questions guiding this research study were (1) how do students' test results compare for students…