Metaphors are regularly used by mathematics teachers to relate difficult or complex concepts in classrooms. A complex topic of concern in mathematics education, and most STEM-based education classes, is problem solving. This study identified how students and teachers contextualize mathematical problem solving through their choice of metaphors.…

While the average teenager's conversation may seem inundated with the word "like", in the mathematics classroom, teenagers use it with purpose. Linguists study the word "like" to understand and categorize comparative statements. By overlapping linguistics and mathematics education within the frame of cognitive science, this study found that high…

This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims of the Study…

The purpose of this study was to determine the metaphors used by students to describe mathematical problem solving. This study focused on identifying how students interpret and perceive mathematical problem solving via conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). These perceptions and interpretations were coded and analyzed qualitatively and…

In this article the author uses Levi-Strauss' (1966) metaphor of Bricolage to examine how teachers, not policymakers, make sense of their "problems of practice" in three United States high schools. The article also examines how teachers address these problems of practice. It concludes by underscoring the disconnect between teachers' and…

This paper reports on five students' explorations of structural relationships between problem situations that they worked on over several years as participants in a long-term study. In particular, we describe the case of students who recognized isomorphisms between and among two problem situations and who used particular features of the problems…