Background: South African learners face the double disadvantage of living in low socioeconomic conditions with access to few resources and attending schools with challenging learning conditions. Mathematics performance reflects such conditions with extreme performance gaps between wealthier and poorer learners. The need for early intervention is…

School life in England (and beyond) is temporally structured, with learning planned as a time-limited activity, both within lessons and across units of work. Discourses of performativity and measurement pervade school life in many societies and, what we call "regulated time" controls school-based learning. In particular, primary…

In this article, the authors explore a number of interesting games as contexts for students learning geometry and enhancing their development of problem solving and reasoning. The games selected were appealing, content-aligned games for approximately four players with simple rules and 10-30 minutes of play time. The games were integrated by…

This paper focuses on children's number fact knowledge from a study that explored the impact of using multiplication and division contexts for developing number understanding with 34 five- and six-year-old children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. After a series of focused lessons, children's knowledge of number facts, including…

Chris Brough and Nigel Calder share two scenarios in which students co-constructed their curriculum through generating their own problem solving and mathematical investigations. This article is a valuable exploration of the benefits of teachers working in partnership with their students.

The present study used a new assessment technique, the story-generation task, to examine students' understanding of subtraction scenes. The students from four grade levels (110 first-, 107 third-, 110 fourth- and 119 sixth-graders) generated stories under the constraints provided by a picture (representing Change, Combine or Compare scene) and a…

This paper presents findings from a larger study that examined the roles that parents and caregivers are given and/or choose to enact to support their children's mathematics learning, particularly in relation to their children's math homework. Based on interviews with parents of elementary-age children from three different urban school districts…

This nonexperimental, longitudinal field study examines the extent to which variation in observed classroom supports (quality of emotional and instructional interactions and amount of exposure to literacy and math activities) predicts trajectories of achievement in reading and math from 54 months to fifth grade. Growth mixture modeling detected…

It is often claimed that working and talking with partners while carrying out maths activities is beneficial to students' learning and the development of their mathematical understanding. However, observational research has shown that primary school children often do not work productively in group-based classroom activities, with the implication…