Even though there is a great temptation as teachers to share what is known, many are aware of an idea called "rules that expire" (RTE) and have realized the importance of avoiding them. There is evidence that students need to understand mathematical concepts and that merely presenting rules to carry out in a procedural and disconnected…

Children's failure to reason often leads to their mathematical performance being shaped by spurious associations from problem input and overgeneralization of inapplicable procedures rather than by whether answers and procedures make sense. In particular, imbalanced distributions of problems, particularly in textbooks, lead children to create…

We present the results of a research project on arithmetic-algebraic thinking that was carried out jointly by a team in Mexico and another in Quebec. The project deals with the concepts of variable and covariation between variables in the sixth grade at the elementary level and the first, second, and third years of secondary school--namely,…

Previous research has found that different presentations of the same concept can result in different patterns of transfer to isomorphic instances of the same concept. Much of this work has framed these effects in terms of advantages and disadvantages of concreteness or abstractness. We note that mathematics is a richly structured field, with…

Mental models are representations of students' minds concepts to explain a situation or an on-going process. The purpose of this study is to describe students' mental model in solving mathematical patterns of generalization problem. Subjects in this study were the VII grade students of junior high school in Situbondo, East Java, Indonesia. This…

The transition from preformal and propaedeutic generalization-actions to a symbolically explicit use of the concept of variable has been a matter of significant attention in mathematics education, for example in the context of generalization processes on a preformal level and regarding the specific nature of algebraic concepts. This contribution…

This study compared the acquisition of an initial place value skill when presented in a concrete, semiconcrete, abstract teaching sequence to acquisition of the same skill when presented at the abstract level only. The 24 subjects were elementary and middle school students (ages 8-13) with learning disabilities who were randomly assigned to…