The "Let's Count" pilot early mathematics program was implemented in five early childhood educational contexts across Australia during 2011. The program used specifically formulated materials and workshops to enlist the assistance of early childhood educators to work with parents and other family members of children in their settings to…

Pattern generalising problems offer a very rich context for exploring relationships among quantities, expressing generality and representing the same relationship in different ways. Selecting appropriate tasks for students to work on in class is by no means a straightforward process, but there are ways to handle it. This article aims to explore…

A Chinese proverb suggests "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand." How to involve or engage today's learner is at the forefront of much educational research and was the impetus for the study reported herein. This study explored the perceptions of Year 4/5 students from nine separate schools…

This paper presents an investigation by pre-service secondary school teachers in a geometry class of the relationship between the perpendicular distance from the eyeball to the wall (x) and the viewable vertical distance on the wall (y) using a view tube of constant length and diameter. In undertaking the investigation, students used tabular and…

With teachers and students in Government and Catholic schools in three geographical clusters in Victoria, the Task Type and Mathematics Learning (TTML) project is investigating the best ways to use different types of mathematics tasks, particularly in Grades 5 to 8. This article describes Type 1 tasks and discusses how they contribute to…

Learning about the area formulas provides many opportunities for students even at the beginning of junior secondary school to experience mathematical deduction. For example, in easy cases, students can put two triangles together to make a rectangle, and so deduce that the area of a triangle is half the area of a corresponding rectangle. They can…

Engaging students with real-world activities can be effective in supporting the learning of mathematics, "whenever possible, real-world situations will provide a context for both introducing and applying geometric topics" (NCTM 1989). Tool making is a way to bring real-world mathematics into the classroom and using the tool is a way of…

In this article, the authors discuss the use by teachers of "Type 2 tasks" within the Task Types in Mathematics Learning (TTML) Project, i.e., those in which the mathematics is situated within a contextualised practical problem. It is argued that these kinds of tasks have great potential for challenging and engaging students, and showing…

To capture aspects of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) not illuminated in an earlier written survey, an interview protocol was used with 40 middle school teachers. The scenarios were intended to elicit teachers' understanding of the big ideas, ability to anticipate students' answers, and intervention strategies for the classroom. This was…

Mathematics and science are tightly interwoven, yet they are often treated as distinct disciplines in the educational context. This study details the development, implementation and outcomes of a teaching intervention that highlights the links between mathematics and science, in the form of a first-year interdisciplinary course. A mixed method…

Humor has been promoted as a teaching tool that enhances student engagement and learning. The present report traces the pathway from research to practice by reflecting upon various ways to incorporate humor into the face-to-face teaching of statistics. The use of humor in an introductory university statistics course was evaluated via interviews…

Measurement is a mathematics skill students encounter often in their daily lives. The act of measuring involves the use of concrete, hands-on materials that students find engaging and appealing. According to Martinie (2004), the best way to teach measurement "is to find or create situations in which students need to measure and let them…

There are many classroom activities that can be implemented with primary students that introduce and immerse them in ratio investigations. Some enjoyable tasks include finding the ratio of tongue rollers to non-tongue rollers in the classroom; left-hand dominant to right-hand dominant; right-thumb over left-thumb when clasping the hands to…

Developing strategies for engaging mathematics activities is always a challenge. Teachers seek out new resources and online activities to excite students and support their learning. Mathematics through Movement offers an active learning strategy requiring few resources, and a bit of imagination, to achieve a variety of outcomes across mathematics…

The concept of a function is fundamental to virtually every aspect of mathematics and every branch of quantitative science. Presently this type of thinking is carolled at the secondary level, and yet it has many benefits for deepening the understanding of early arithmetic. This is particularly so in the way that operations can be considered as…