Studies have found that some teacher professional development programs that are based on Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) can increase student mathematics achievement. The mechanism through which those effects are realized has been theorized, but more empirical study is needed. In service of this need, we designed a novel measure of…

Based on Piaget's theory of logico-mathematical knowledge, 126 students in grades 2-5 were asked 6 questions about elapsed time. The main reason found for difficulty with elapsed time is children's inability to coordinate hierarchical units (hours and minutes). The educational implications drawn are that students must be encouraged to think about…

The purpose of this article is to elaborate Cottrill et al.'s (1996) conceptual framework of limit, an explanatory model of how students might come to understand the limit concept. Drawing on a retrospective analysis of 2 teaching experiments, we propose 2 theoretical constructs to account for the students' success in formulating and understanding…

Piaget (1971) made a distinction between intuitive (preoperational) time and operational (logico-mathematical) time. According to Piaget, operational time develops around 7-8 years of age and is characterized by children's ability to deduce, for example, that if A was born before B, A will always be older than B. When time is still intuitive,…

A content analysis of over 28,000 pages from 141 elementary school mathematics textbooks published between 1900 and 2000 shows that widely used mathematics textbooks have changed substantially. Textbooks from the early part of the century were typically narrow in content but presented substantial amounts of advanced arithmetic and also asked…

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's construction of 10s out of the 1s they have already constructed. It was found that, for many younger children, a dime was something different from 10 pennies even though they could say with confidence that a dime was worth 10 cents. As the children grew older, their performance improved.…

The authors challenge some of the conclusions reached about Piaget by Brian Rotman in his book. (MK)

Presents a way of interpreting mathematics classrooms, by advancing the notion of sociomathematical norms, to account for how students develop mathematical beliefs and values and how they become intellectually autonomous in mathematics. Includes episodes from a second-grade classroom to clarify the processes by which sociomathematical norms are…

The Piagetian area scores of 168 students in first, second, and third grades were used to predict mathematics achievement for each of four succeeding years. Conservation and measurement scores were highly predictive. (MP)

The ability of students in grades 1-12 to generate proofs of theorems in an unfamiliar, one axiom, abstract system was investigated. There were no significant differences in performance of two levels of secondary students; fourth- through sixth-grade students were also able to develop proofs, but needed more time. (SD)

A review of 25 years of Piagetian research in intellectual growth as it pertains to the learning and understanding of mathematics and implications for teaching. (MM)

An outline of a model that provides a new perspective on the conceptual foundations of mathematics and a new approach for the study of children's acquisition of numerical operations is proposed. Attention is viewed as a pulse-like succession of moments and is supported by recent data from neurophysiology. (MP)

Problem-solving processes used by concrete- and formal-operational eighth-grade pupils were investigated through interviews. Formal-operational pupils used a larger variety of processes. Also, a larger variety of processes were used on more complex problems. (MP)

Defines spatial structuring as the mental operation of constructing an organization or form for an object/set of objects. Examines in detail students' structuring and enumeration of two-dimensional rectangular arrays of squares. Concludes that many students do not see row-by-column structure. Describes various levels of sophistication in students'…