Students exhibiting mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient problem-solving strategies (McIntosh et al., 1997; Reys et al., 1999; Yang, 2005). Despite being highlighted in national standards and policy documents (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000, 2014),…

This study examined the effects of an academic intervention, associated with music, on the conceptual understanding of musical notation and arithmetic of fractions of first-year students of high school from a mixed Spanish multicultural and socioeconomic public school. The students (N = 12) had previous concepts about musical instruction, as well…

This paper frames children's mathematics as mathematics. Specifically, it draws upon our knowledge of children's mathematics and applies it to understanding the prime number theorem. Elementary school arithmetic emphasizes two principal operations: addition and multiplication. Through their units coordination activity, children construct two…

This study investigated the effects of working memory load (WML) and automaticity on mental addition through an examination of both task and individual characteristics within the framework of cognitive load theory. Results from 73 fourth graders showed that WML, automaticity, and their interaction had significant effects on mental addition.…

Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

Decimals and the related areas of ratio and proportion are recognised as one of the most challenging and complex areas of mathematics for young children to learn. In this study, four dynamic digital representations were used by Year 4 (9-10 years old) students in a set of video-recorded, individual task-based interviews to explore key concepts of…

With the growing prevalence of mobile apps for self-directed learning, educational games increasingly find their place in everyday routines, becoming accessible to a broad audience. Despite the growing ease of content creation by artificial intelligence computing, the challenge of designing effective and engaging Serious Games remains,…

Researchers, who have studied the understanding of the density property in the set of decimal numbers, have shown that the student uses the property of the discrete of natural numbers to solve tasks related to density. So, a restructuring of concepts is necessary, that is, a conceptual change from "the discrete" to "the dense".…

Despite curriculum expectations, many students, including a disproportionate number of girls, do not 'just know' (retrieve) single-digit addition facts by Year 3. The current study employed structured interviews to explore which strategies Year 3/4 students (n = 166) used when solving more difficult addition combinations. Results revealed that…

Studies on math learning programs are lacking that consider a wide set of outcome variables, and students' practice behavior. Therefore, we investigated whether an adaptive arithmetic learning program fosters students' math performance (addition and subtraction), math self-concept, and a reduction of math anxiety, and how practice behavior…

Reasoning about fraction magnitude is an important topic in elementary mathematics because it lays the foundations for meaningful reasoning about fraction operations. Much of the research literature has reported deficits in preservice elementary teachers' (PSTs) knowledge of fractions and has given little attention to the productive resources that…

The development of mathematical reasoning is a key proficiency for mathematics within the Australian Curriculum. However, reasoning can be difficult for teachers to assess, particularly with pen and paper tests. In this study, interview tasks were designed across three curriculum areas at three different levels to assess student reasoning through…

A new classification for semantic structures of one-step word problems is proposed in this paper. The classification is based on illustrations of word problem situations in Common Core State Standards (CCSSM, 2010) and related historical studies (e.g. Weaver, 1973, 1979, 1982), as well as conceptual elaborations of embodied and grounded nature in…

Literature typically describes mathematization, the process of transforming a real-world situation into a mathematical model, in terms of desirable actions and behaviors students exhibit. We attended to STEM undergraduate students' quantitative reasoning as they derived equations. Analysis of the meanings they held for arithmetic operations (+, -,…

This proposal explores relationships between young children's unit development/coordination and young children's subitizing. In particular, this theoretical commentary considers students' degrees of abstraction, students' development of actions on units, and students' operations with units when subitizing. As a result of this commentary, this…