How do students cope with and make sense of polysemy in mathematics? Zazkis (1998) tackled these questions in the case of 'divisor' and 'quotient'. When requested to determine the quotient in the division of 12 by 5, some of her pre-service teachers operated in the domain of integers and argued for 2, while others adhered to rational numbers and…

One of the key courses in the mathematics teacher education program in Israel is arithmetic, which engages in contents which these pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) will later teach at school. Teaching arithmetic involves knowledge about the essence of the concept of "number" and the development thereof, calculation methods and…

In this article we present an integrative framework of knowledge for teaching the standard algorithms of the four basic arithmetic operations. The framework is based on a mathematical analysis of the algorithms, a connectionist perspective on teaching mathematics and an analogy with previous frameworks of knowledge for teaching arithmetic…

The study investigates the mathematical and the pedagogical content knowledge among in-service and pre-service first- and second-grade mathematics teachers. The sample of 300 subjects consisted of 150 first- and second-grade in-service teachers and 150 pre-service teachers studying in a college of education, 75 of whom were first-year students and…

In a teaching experiment, I examined a theoretical model of mathematics teaching and learning in practice. In this paper I focus on how the model can guide the teacher's thinking about students' understandings and the generation of activities that foster intended transformations in those understandings. As a research-teacher I taught, twice a week…

This study investigated the development of an additive schema from the perspective of the schema's flexibility in coping with new context and unfamiliar semantic structure. It followed 27 first graders who learned addition and subtraction using an experimental curriculum. The instruction involved a didactical model combining the context of two…

Studied schemes involved in solving two-step arithmetic word problems in (n=1824) elementary schoolchildren in Israel. Compound schemes and combinations of operations were found to affect the difficulty level of the problems. Appendix includes two versions of the test instrument. (Contains 17 references.) (MKR)

This document contains the second volume of the proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Conference presentations are centered around the theme "Mathematics at the Centre." This volume features 60 research reports by presenters with last names beginning between Abr…

The first volume of the 29th annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education contains plenary lecture and research forum papers as listed below. Short oral communications papers, poster presentations, brief summaries of discussion groups, and working sessions are also included in the volume. The plenary…