In studies over recent years, there has been an increasing interest in teachers' predicting middle school students' thinking processes. However, as far as we are aware, there are no studies examining students' thinking in terms of mathematical thinking components. This study primarily aimed to determine the mathematical thinking of middle school…

The use of tasks to promote mathematical reasoning (MR) in teaching practice is essential to meet curricular goals. However, that practice is often a huge challenge for teachers, and particularly for prospective teachers and thus it is essential to highlight it as a goal for initial teacher education. This study focuses on preservice mathematics…

We investigate the beliefs that influence middle and high school algebra teachers' appraisals of contextual problems having diverse mathematical and pedagogical features. We asked six teachers to analyze six contextual algebra tasks and indicate how they would apportion instructional time among the six tasks based on their structure, pedagogical…

The purpose of the current article is to test and revise the hypothetical learning trajectory designed for teaching quadrilaterals by reporting the classroom mathematical practices emerged in a social learning environment developing preservice middle school mathematics teachers' understanding of quadrilaterals. Ten preservice teachers participated…

An exploratory study was conducted to investigate the use of magic activities in a math course for prospective middle-school math teachers. This research report focuses on a lesson using two versions of math magic: (1) the "5-4-3-2-1-½ Magic" involves having students choose a secret number and apply six arithmetic operations in sequence…

Implementing challenging mathematics tasks with multilingual students who are not yet fluent in the instructional language is difficult for monolingual teachers because of the linguistic and cultural differences between the teacher and students. In this study, we examined how monolingual preservice teachers set up cognitively demanding mathematics…

Progressing from additive to multiplicative thinking is critical for the development of middle school students' proportional reasoning abilities. Yet, many middle school mathematics teachers lack a thorough understanding of additive versus multiplicative situations. This article describes a sequence of instructional activities used to develop the…

In this article, the authors present a writing activity that allowed pre-service teachers to be creative in the mathematics classroom. Inspired by "The Important Book" by Margaret Wise Brown, students explored secondary-level mathematics concepts, discussing various attributes/characteristics of each concept through their written…

Engaging mathematics students with modelling activities helps them learn mathematics meaningfully. This engagement, in the case of model eliciting activities, helps the students elicit mathematical models by interpreting real-world situation in mathematical ways. This is especially true when the students utilize technology to build the models.…

This study came to characterize the features of mathematical models built by mathematics pre-service teachers for a model eliciting activity. Fourteen groups participated in building the models. We used a combination of deductive and inductive content analysis to characterize the pre-service teachers' elicited models, taking into account features…

This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks…

Guided by the principles of lesson study as applied to microteaching, this paper discusses the results and conclusions of a series of activities done by some graduate students of De La Salle University, Philippines, in an attempt to test the applicability of the lesson--Sequence and Patterns--to facilitate the transition of seventh graders from…

Although many researchers have examined knowledge building in traditional settings and distance learning, few have examined middle school students' building of mathematical knowledge using mobile phones. The present study uses two well-known models of knowledge building to carry out the examination: the interactive analysis model of knowledge…

This article describes a mathematics and literature interdisciplinary project for preservice elementary teachers that was implemented in several urban middle school classrooms. This project, based on the novel Chasing Vermeer by Balliett (2004), involved a dramatization of one of the chapters from the book and a follow-up mathematical exploration.

This article describes a set of learning activities that use algebraic problems and written student work to help preservice and in-service teachers understand students' algebraic thinking. (Contains 4 figures.)