Pedagogical content knowledge forms the core of teachers' professional knowledge; it refers to knowledge about making subject matter accessible to students. Thus, the formation of pedagogical content knowledge constitutes a crucial issue for educational research and practice. We investigated the contributions of content knowledge and pedagogical…

According to the views of social constructivism, learning takes place when individuals engage socially to talk about and act on shared problems or interests. In recent years, this approach has been very popular for the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary and secondary education. On the contrary, in tertiary education, it seems that…

Many children in the U.S. initially come to understand the equal sign operationally, as a symbol meaning "add up the numbers" rather than relationally, as an indication that the two sides of an equation share a common value. According to a change-resistance account (McNeil & Alibali, 2005b), children's operational ways of thinking…

Laboratory experiments by Steele and Aronson (1995) found that African-American subjects' performance on difficult verbal items, described as a verbal problem-solving task, was adversely affected when they were asked about their ethnicity just before working on the items. These results were attributed to stereotype threat. Asking about ethnicity…