Investigators often rely on the proportion of correct responses in an assessment when describing the impact of early mathematics interventions on child outcomes. Here, we propose a shift in focus to the relative sophistication of problem-solving strategies and offer methodological guidance to researchers interested in working with strategies. We…

The importance of mathematical problem solving (MPS) has been widely recognized. While there has been significant progress in developing and studying interventions to support teaching and learning MPS for students with disabilities, the research on how to accurately and effectively assess the impact of those interventions has lagged, leaving a gap…

When researchers code behavior that is undetectable or falls outside of the validated ordinal scale, the resultant outcomes often suffer from informative missingness. Incorrect analysis of such data can lead to biased arguments around efficacy and effectiveness in the context of experimental and intervention research. Here, we detail a new…

Assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding is an important step in observational studies, which typically estimate effects under the assumption that all confounders are measured. In this paper, we develop a sensitivity analysis framework for balancing weights estimators, an increasingly popular approach that solves an optimization problem to…

Math anxiety has been found to negatively correlate with math achievement, affecting students' choices to take fewer math classes and avoid math educational opportunities. Educational technology tools can ameliorate some of the negative effects of math anxiety. We examined students' math anxiety, effort in an educational technology platform, and…

Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) is a teacher PD program that has been found to have a potentially positive impact on student learning in mathematics through randomized controlled trials. Through a series of grant-funded projects led by FSU, approximately 2,000 Florida teachers have participated in CGI-based professional development in the…

Word problem solving is the premise for students to generalize their problem solving skills to real world problems. This includes students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID). Modified Schema-based Instruction (MSBI) is one strategy that research has shown is effective for teaching students with ASD/ID to acquire…

To construct dialogue-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) with sufficient pedagogical expertise, a trendy research method is to mine large-scale data collected by existing dialogue-based ITS or generated between human tutors and students to discover effective tutoring strategies. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on…

Because creativity is an essential 21st century skill that must be developed in gifted and talented student populations, it is important for gifted and talented programs to nurture mathematical creativity. To shed light on this topic, this article explores three questions: What is mathematical creativity? How can we develop students' mathematical…

In this article, we focus on pairing instructional approaches with a strong evidence base in math with evidence-based practices for students with extensive support needs. To do so we draw on two sources. We use the 2021 Practice Guide from the Institution for Education Sciences (Fuchs et al., 2021). In addition, we use identified evidence-based…

Purpose: To evaluate the validity, reliability, and sensitivity of the novel Means-End Problem-Solving Assessment Tool (MEPSAT). Methods: Children with typical development and those with motor delay were assessed throughout the first 2 years of life using the MEPSAT. MEPSAT scores were validated against the cognitive and motor subscales of the…

This paper explores how learning analytics data provided by a math problem-solving educational technology platform informed 5th and 6th grade teachers' instructional decisions around socioemotional learning (SEL). MathSpring is an educational technology tool that provides teachers with data on students' effort, progress, and emotions while…

Persistence is an important part of student success--both in and out of school. To enhance persistence, we first need to assess it accurately. Digital games can be used as vehicles for measuring and enhancing persistence. The purpose of this study is to test the effects of (a) game-level characteristics (i.e., game mechanics and conceptual…

Many randomized controlled experiments in the classroom have found that mathematics learning is improved dramatically when practice problems of one kind are distributed across multiple assignments (spaced) and mixed with other kinds of problems (interleaved). In two studies, we investigated students' knowledge of spacing and interleaving. In Study…

Project-based learning (PBL) is an instructional approach that provides civics, social studies, and American government students with the opportunity to actively and cooperatively engage with real-world issues and situations. Students typically identify a problem in their community or school, research the problem and policy-based solutions,…