This article reports on an empirical study that investigates the way students' performance in solving arithmetical tasks may be related to their performance in solving algebraic tasks. The sample consisted of 203 Grade 6 students. The arithmetical tasks involved arithmetical expressions with known quantities, whereas the algebraic tasks involved…

Procedural flexibility is an important skill for algebra. Although prior work has focused on measuring students' procedural flexibility using arithmetic problems, word problems may also capture students' flexibility because of their open-ended nature. To date, no published study has examined the use of word problems as another measure of…

An alternating treatments design was used to analyze the effects of concrete and virtual manipulatives on the duration and number of correctly solved linear equations by three middle school students with cognitive disabilities. Participants physically manipulated algebra tiles to solve an equation during the concrete manipulative condition. During…

Productive failure has shown positive effects on conceptual and transfer measures, but no clear effects on procedural measures. It is therefore an open question whether, and to what extent, productive failure methods may be used to enhance the learning of procedural skills. A typical productive failure study focuses on a single, complex concept;…

New educational technologies that utilize students' interaction data and visualizations provide a means to expand our understanding of learning processes. In this study, we apply two advanced and novel data visualization techniques, called the "Indivisualizer" and a "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle school students (N =…

New educational technologies that utilize students' interaction data and visualizations provide a means to expand our understanding of learning processes. In this study, we apply two advanced and novel data visualization techniques, called the "Indivisualizer" and a "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle school students (N =…

The current study assessed whether adding worked examples with self-explanation prompts focused on making connections between mathematical principles, procedures, and concepts of rational numbers to a curriculum focused on invented strategies improves pre-algebra students' fraction number line acuity, rational number concepts and procedures.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of algebraic equation solving intervention for sixth graders with mathematics learning difficulties (MD). A total of 48 students with MD were randomly assigned to either the algebraic equation solving intervention, "Mystery Math" (n = 24) or control condition (n = 24). The…

We apply an advanced data visualization technique, "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle-school students (N = 343) solved problems in a game-based algebraic notation tool. The results indicate that there is a large variation in the types of students' strategies to solve the problems, with some approaches being more efficient than…

Reform movements in mathematics education advocate that mathematical argumentation play a central role in all classrooms. However, research shows that mathematics teachers at all grade level find it challenging to support argumentation in mathematics classrooms. This study examines the role of teachers' mathematical knowledge in teachers' support…

This study explored how students develop meaning of functions by building on their understanding of expressions and equations. A teaching experiment using design research was conducted in a sixth-grade classroom. The data was analyzed using a grounded theory approach to provide explanations about why events occurred within this teaching episode…

Prior work exploring preschool-aged children's reasoning with repeating patterns has shown that patterning ability is an important predictor of math achievement; however, there is limited research exploring older children's growing pattern task performance. The current study tested whether presentation format impacts performance on growing pattern…

Does the timing of children's formal understanding of mathematical equivalence matter for algebra readiness? A change-resistance account (McNeil & Alibali, 2005) predicts that it is beneficial for children to construct a formal understanding of mathematical equivalence in the early grades before overly narrow operational patterns become…

Although visual representations are generally beneficial for learners, past research also suggests that often only a subset of learners benefits from visual representations. In this work, we designed and evaluated anticipatory diagrammatic self- explanation, a novel form of instructional scaffolding in which visual representations are used to…

The aim of this paper is to analyse the reasoning and symbolisations used by sixth grade Moroccan students in solving a task based on figurative patterns. Our analysis aims at identifying the systems of actions elaborated by the students to give the general expression of the sequence, according to their perceptions of the sequence of its patterns.…