Counting is fundamental to early mathematics. Most studies of teaching counting focus on teachers observing children count. The present study compares mathematical ideas that 12 PK, transitional kindergarten (TK), and kindergarten teachers noticed from observing their own students count during a classroom session of Counting Collections with ideas…

Even when parents have the time required to support their children's education, they can increase their children's anxiety about school when they try to help, especially if they are not confident in their own abilities. This study measures the effects of having parents complete nonacademic schoolwork with their teenage children. Half of the 422…

In this article, I investigate the influence of the dominant culture characterizing mathematics education--which I term the "culture of exclusion"--on efforts to teach for equity. Analyzing a year of observations in an urban high school mathematics department, I found that this culture structured everyday instruction even for teachers…

Our aim is to discuss how school mathematical activity is modified when students' everyday situations are brought into the classroom. One illustrative sequence--7th grade classes solving problems that required proportional reasoning--is characterized as a system of interconnected activities within the theoretical perspective of activity theory. We…

To learn mathematical practices, students need opportunities to engage in them. But simply providing such opportunities may not be sufficient to support all students. Simultaneously, explicitly teaching mathematical practices could be problematic if instruction becomes prescriptive. This study investigated how teachers might make mathematical…

This study evaluated the effects of a mathematics software program, the Building Blocks software suite, on young children's mathematics performance. Participants included 247 Kindergartners from 37 classrooms in 9 schools located in low-income communities. Children within classrooms were randomly assigned to receive 21 weeks of computer-assisted…

This study examines how collective activity related to multiplication evolved over several class sessions in an elementary mathematics content course that was designed to foster prospective elementary teachers' number-sense development. We document how the class drew on as-if-shared ideas to make sense of multidigit multiplication in terms of…

Identity is an important tool for understanding students' participation in mathematics lessons. Researchers usually examine identity at a macro-scale: across typical classroom activity and in students' self-reports. However, learning occurs on a micro-scale: in moments during a lesson. To capture identity in these moments, I used positioning…

Describes one pattern of reasoning observed in a mathematical activity with students in a grade 5 class and discusses ways in which the pattern is or is not mathematical. Describes patterns of reasoning in terms of ways of reasoning and degree of formulation of the reasoning. Distinguishes between mathematical reasoning and scientific reasoning in…