According to the views of social constructivism, learning takes place when individuals engage socially to talk about and act on shared problems or interests. In recent years, this approach has been very popular for the teaching and learning of mathematics in primary and secondary education. On the contrary, in tertiary education, it seems that…

The main goal of this paper is to show how Vasily Davydov's powerful ideas about the nature of mathematical thinking and learning can transform the teaching and learning of additive word problem solving. The name Vasily Davydov is well known in the field of mathematics education in Russia. However, the transformative value of Davydov's theoretical…

Laboratory experiments by Steele and Aronson (1995) found that African-American subjects' performance on difficult verbal items, described as a verbal problem-solving task, was adversely affected when they were asked about their ethnicity just before working on the items. These results were attributed to stereotype threat. Asking about ethnicity…