This cross-national study examined students' evaluation of strategies for solving linear equations, as well as the extent to which their evaluation criteria were related to their use of strategies and/or aligned with experts' views about which strategy is the best. A total of 792 middle school and high school students from Sweden, Finland, and…

This study focuses on computer-based formative assessment for supporting problem solving and reasoning in mathematics. To be able to assist students who find themselves in difficulties, the software suggested descriptions - diagnoses - of the encountered difficulty the students could choose from. Thereafter, the software provided metacognitive and…

The aim of this study is to measure the effects of teaching problem-solving strategies as an integrated part of the mathematical content prescribed by the curriculum. By implementing the designs principles developed in the previous study, we carry out a one-year-long teaching intervention in a Swedish upper secondary school. Pre- and post-tests…

This article explores children's development of problem-solving practices through multimodal engagements in digital activities. The study is based on analyses of a video recorded peer group activity in which two children, within the context of a project on computational thinking using the software "Scratch," collaboratively work to solve…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…

Students' different learning performance on mathematical problem solving across contexts has attracted a number of researchers' interest. The study investigates the spatial orientation ability of primary school students in an outdoor situation, where six pairs of grade six students are asked to coordinate themselves physically in terms of given…

Background: Context-based learning approaches are used to enhance students' interest in, and knowledge about, science. According to different empirical studies, students' interest is improved by applying these more non-conventional approaches, while effects on learning outcomes are less coherent. Hence, further insights are needed into the…

The authors used the operand-recognition paradigm (C. Thevenot, M. Fanget, & M. Fayol, 2007) in order to study the strategies used by adults to solve subtraction problems. This paradigm capitalizes on the fact that algorithmic procedures degrade the memory traces of the operands. Therefore, greater difficulty in recognizing them is expected…

A study of interactions among Swedish intermediate-grade students as they solved a nonstandard mathematics task confronting the phenomenon of infinity shows that the children can reach a considerable understanding of the problem by contextualizing the problem in different ways. The collective orchestration of problem variations results in enhanced…