Mathematical modelling is acknowledged to be one of the major dimensions of mathematical competence, and well-designed modelling activities can provide students with the opportunity to use mathematical concepts and procedures in a meaningful way. Additionally, modelling activities are regarded as suitable contexts for enabling students to use…

Progressing from additive to multiplicative thinking is critical for the development of middle school students' proportional reasoning abilities. Yet, many middle school mathematics teachers lack a thorough understanding of additive versus multiplicative situations. This article describes a sequence of instructional activities used to develop the…

Mathematical conventions -- which account for the choices of mathematics community regarding definitions of concepts, their names and symbols -- are the focus of this paper. We introduce the task of unpacking, that is, offering plausible explanations and arguments for the choice of conventions. Using responses of four prospective teachers to the…

By working through well-designed tasks, students can expand their thinking about mathematical ideas and their approaches to solving mathematical problems. They can come to see the value of looking at tasks from different perspectives and of using different representations. This article discusses four tasks that encourage high school students and…

Research shows that preservice teachers can enhance their growth and development through interactions with children in the school setting as a component of their coursework in education. Additionally, preservice teachers feel they need more interactions with parents in their university preparation. Family Math Night has the potential to address…

The recently revised "Northern Ireland Primary Curriculum" recommends that teachers make use of the environment to extend children's understanding of mathematics. One approach to using the environment in mathematics is to take children on a mathematics trail. A mathematics trail uses the resources and features within the environment as a…

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…

Kalchman describes and discusses preservice teachers' changing views of what it means to know and do mathematics both inside and outside the classroom walls. The context for change is a weekly assignment for methods students to describe and solve mathematical problems in situations that they confront in day-to-day life. The assignment supports…

Whether they are third graders or teacher candidates, students can learn about perimeter and area while having fun manipulating two-dimensional figures into three-dimensional objects. In this article, the author describes a common mathematical activity for geometry students by creating nets for a cube. By making connections between nets in two…

This article focuses on a secondary mathematics teacher education program where traditional field placements are prevalent in grades 9-12. Traditional, for this article, is defined as and comprised of: (a) straight-rowed desks in classrooms, (b) explicitly direct instruction (teacher-centered classrooms), (c) predominantly repetition of low-level…

This article discusses the difficulties preservice teachers experience when they try to make sense of the standard long-division algorithm, describes a realistic context that we have found productive in helping our students think about why the algorithm works and the role of place value in the algorithm, and suggests the applicability of this…

This article describes a mathematics and literature interdisciplinary project for preservice elementary teachers that was implemented in several urban middle school classrooms. This project, based on the novel Chasing Vermeer by Balliett (2004), involved a dramatization of one of the chapters from the book and a follow-up mathematical exploration.

Describes the development and implementation of a service learning project carried out at Portland State University, including the mechanics of the project and excerpts from student journals with reflections on their growth in this process. (Author/ASK)

Partnerships, especially the Professional Development School (PDS) model, between institutions of higher education (IHE) and public schools (PS), have become, if not commonplace, a successful model for teacher education. PDS teacher education projects in which preservice teachers and higher education faculty participate in school-based instruction…

Mentoring is often assumed to be done by experienced teachers with new teachers in one-on-one settings and designed to help the mentee be successful with the tasks of teaching. In the context of preservice teacher education, mentoring usually takes place during field experiences, particularly student teaching when the mentor is the host classroom…