Using data from a problem-posing project, this study analyzed the characteristics of middle school students' responses to problem-posing prompts that did not match our assumptions and expectations to better understand student thinking. The study found that the characteristics of middle school students' unexpected responses were distributed across…

In educational settings, reflective thinking is often overlooked, with an excessive emphasis on final answers, resulting in students needing more ability to evaluate and reconstruct their problem-solving processes. The ability for reflective thinking is required by students in solving problems, including numerical problems. This study uses a…

Metacognition supports students in successfully working through struggle by equipping them with the tools to maintain an awareness of what they are doing and to change directions when needed to overcome obstacles. Thus, it is of little surprise that effective problem solvers spend a significant amount of time analyzing tasks relative to the amount…

Using question 28 from the May Problems to Ponder in volume 114, the author and her seventh- and eighth-grade students launched into a discussion of creativity, linearity, piecewise, and recursive definitions of functions. This pattern to ponder provided rich mathematical opportunities for all students in her middle school classroom.

Mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs) need opportunities to learn best practices in teaching mathematics, e.g., productive struggle. Productive struggle happens when students work through challenging problems that are not straightforward. This paper describes mathematics PSTs' engagement with productive struggle in a mathematics methods course.…

This study aims to reveal the mathematical reasoning process of 8th-grade students and the reasoning indicators they use in this process. The study was carried out in line with the data obtained from the Mathematical Reasoning Test (MRT) administered to 292 8th-grade students. The mathematical reasoning performances of the participants were…

Effective teaching requires enjoyable classroom tasks aimed at promoting students' learning of mathematics meaningfully, and previous research has demonstrated that the use of origami activities in mathematics classrooms can help achieve that goal. In this article, the authors describe their "LOVE MATH" one-straight-cut letter origami…

Though there is an extensive research literature on understanding and assessing individual modeling competencies, less attention has been given to characterizing the social context of the classroom in which modeling occurs. Yet a classroom's culture of modeling--its negotiated system of beliefs and values about the nature of modeling and what…

Productive struggle is crucial to students' mathematics learning. However, it has proven difficult for teachers to sustain struggle when it is productive or make it so when it is not. Studies show that teachers may offer students support when their struggles are productive or even refrain from offering support when students' struggles are…

Students often perform arithmetic using rigid problem-solving strategies that involve left-to-right-calculations. However, as students progress from arithmetic to algebra, entrenchment in rigid problem-solving strategies can negatively impact performance as students experience varied problem representations that sometimes conflict with the order…

When one sets out to solve a mathematics problem, a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment comes with finding the answer and knowing it is correct. In contrast, a student performing the correct process to solve an algebra equation and getting an answer such as 3 = 0 may be left perplexed and not understanding what--if anything--he or she did…

This study investigated the methods that pre-service teachers employed while finding volume using integration and the reasons why they utilized these methods (problems); the accuracy of their solutions was also analyzed in this study. Case study design, a qualitative research method, was used for this study. 45 sophomore pre-service teachers…

The ability to solve mathematical problems has been an interesting research topic for several decades. Intuition is considered a part of higher-level thinking that can help improve mathematical problem-solving abilities. Although many studies have been conducted on mathematical problem-solving, research on intuition as a bridge in mathematical…

The beginning of the school year is a time of intense work for students and teachers, especially if it means learning mathematics in new ways (Ruef 2016). Students need guidance and support if they are shifting beliefs about what it means to do mathematics. This article shows how Torres and her students co-created new ways to be good at…

Mathematical thinking is closely related to students' success in solving mathematical problems. Local culture can be a resource to teach mathematical thinking skills. Nonetheless, a lot of teachers still struggle to help students develop their mathematical thinking abilities. This study aims to investigate the ethnomathematics approach applied by…