In many Canadian schools the acronym BEDMAS is used as a mnemonic to assist students in remembering the order of operations: Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction. In the USA the mnemonic is PEMDAS, where 'P' denotes parentheses, along with the phrase "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally". In the UK the…

How do students cope with and make sense of polysemy in mathematics? Zazkis (1998) tackled these questions in the case of 'divisor' and 'quotient'. When requested to determine the quotient in the division of 12 by 5, some of her pre-service teachers operated in the domain of integers and argued for 2, while others adhered to rational numbers and…

This is the second of a two-part article that presents a theory of unit construction and coordination that underlies radical constructivist empirical studies of student learning ranging from young students' counting strategies to high school students' algebraic reasoning. In Part I, I discussed the formation of arithmetical units and composite…

Drawing on the work of Gattegno, it is suggested that a powerful way of teaching mathematics is to introduce symbols as relationships between visible or tangible resources. The symbols are abstract (formal) from the beginning and yet there are concrete resources to support their use. Drawing on data from a research project in primary schools in…

Presents and criticizes current theories of multiplication in order to pave the way for an alternative foundation for the concept of multiplication. Formulates a uniform concept of multiplication that recognizes anew the importance of the roles of multiplier and multiplicand. (Contains 22 references.) (ASK)