Teachers can make number talks more ambitious and increase learning opportunities for students by debugging errors, promoting multi-student thinking, and orienting to make connections. This article describes the basic number talks routine and examines some common tendencies, such as "Serial Sharing." It concludes with a vignette to…

Over three decades ago, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 1991) proposed that "for students to develop the ability to formulate problems, to explore, conjecture, and reason logically, to evaluate whether something makes sense, classroom discourse must be founded on mathematical evidence" (p. 34). As math interventionists…

This article illustrates how teachers can use number lines to support students with or at risk for learning disabilities (LD) in mathematics. Number lines can be strategically used to help students understand relations among numbers, approach number combinations (i.e., basic facts), as well as represent and solve addition and subtraction problems.…

Building proficiency with fraction arithmetic poses a consistent challenge for students with learning difficulties or disabilities in mathematics. This article illustrates how teachers can use the number line model to support struggling learners in making sense of fraction arithmetic. Number lines are a powerful tool that can be used to help…

The duo of artefacts is a simplified model of the complex systems of various manipulatives (either tangible or virtual) that mathematics teachers and their students use in classrooms. It offers a means to study the complexity of the interweaving of the tangible and of the digital worlds in the teaching and learning processes. A duo of artefacts is…

Understanding negative numbers can be challenging for many students, as these concepts may seem less tangible than counting objects, which are commonly represented by positive numbers. In addition, the multiplication of two negative numbers resulting in a positive might appear inconsistent and puzzling to young learners who are used to seeing the…

Learning the meaning of number words is a lengthy and error-prone process. In this review, we highlight outstanding issues related to current accounts of children's acquisition of symbolic number knowledge. We maintain that, despite the ability to identify and label small numerical quantities, children do not understand initially that number words…

This article describes students learning to build their own numbering system by recognizing and identifying patterns with interlocking cubes in different place values. The students used the Egyptian hieroglyphic numeral system in conjunction with this activity to connect learning in other subjects. Students used prior knowledge of place value to…

Solving problems involving absolute value is one of the hardest topics for students learning in elementary algebra course. This is an important topic in student's mathematics life since absolute value functions are important example of a function which is continuous on the real line but not differentiable at the origin. A deep understanding of…

In this paper, we provide an overall perspective on the teaching and learning of discrete mathematics. Our aim is to highlight what research has been conducted in this area and to connect it to existing research ideas for future work. We begin by characterizing discrete mathematics and its role in the school curriculum, highlighting themes,…

This article describes some of the essential mathematics that underpins the use of algorithms through a series of learning pathways. To begin, a graphic depicting the mathematical ideas and concepts that underpin the learning of algorithms for multiplication and division is provided. The understanding and use of algorithms is informed by two…

This article describes Ulrich Kortenkamp's Place Value Chart app and the accompanying teacher guide developed by the members of an international research team led by regular contributor Kevin Larkin.

An instructional approach is presented for teaching the mole concept to high school introductory-level chemistry classes. Extensions to the strategy are presented for more advanced classes. The strength of the approach is based upon discovery. Students discover the Avogadro number and the mole concept. The discovery is based upon calculations that…

This document includes instructional tips on: (1) Building on students' informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial fraction concepts; (2) Helping students recognize that fractions are numbers that expand the number system beyond whole numbers, and using number lines to teach this and other fraction concepts; (3)…

This paper makes a proposal, from the perspective of a research mathematician interested in mathematics education, for broadening and deepening whole number arithmetic instruction, to make it more relevant for the twenty-first century, in particular, to enable students to deal with large numbers, arguably an essential skill for modern citizenship.…