Embodied Cognition approaches suggest that movements influence the understanding of abstract concepts such as time. It follows that moving the arms as watch hands should boost children's learning to read the clock. In a school setting, we compared three learning conditions: an embodied (movement) condition, an interactive App condition, and a text…

Children's understanding of fractions, including their symbols, concepts, and arithmetic procedures, is an important facet of both developmental research on mathematics cognition and mathematics education. Research on infants', children's, and adults' fraction and ratio reasoning allows us to test a range of proposals about the development of…

Mastering traditional algorithms has formed mathematics teaching in primary education. Educational reforms have emphasized variation and creativity in teaching and using computational strategies. These changes have recently been criticized for lack of empirical support. This research examines the effect of teaching two differently structured…

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…

Elementary school children (ages 7-11) struggle to understand mathematical equivalence, a foundational prealgebraic concept. Some manipulations to the learning environment, including well-structured nontraditional arithmetic practice alone, have been shown to improve children's understanding; however, improvements have been modest. The goal of…

Children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) appear to have particular problems in understanding the numerical meaning of Arabic digits. Therefore, we developed and evaluated a numerical domino game that specifically targeted the association between these digits and the numerical magnitudes they represent. Participants were 30 children with…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether individual differences in at-risk 4th graders' language comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, concept formation, working memory, and use of decimal labels (i.e., place value, point, incorrect place value, incorrect fraction, or whole number) are related to their decimal magnitude understanding.…

Many children in the U.S. initially come to understand the equal sign operationally, as a symbol meaning "add up the numbers" rather than relationally, as an indication that the two sides of an equation share a common value. According to a change-resistance account (McNeil & Alibali, 2005b), children's operational ways of thinking…

The aim of this single-case intervention study was to examine whether a conceptual knowledge-based strategy training would improve the accuracy of single-digit arithmetical calculation in a child with specific language impairment. The intervention concerned an 11-year-old Finnish-speaking child with specific language impairment. He was trained…

Previous studies have shown that even preschoolers can solve inversion problems of the form a + b - b by using the knowledge that addition and subtraction are inverse operations. In this study, a new type of inversion problem of the form d x e [divided by] e was also examined. Grade 6 and 8 students solved inversion problems of both types as well…

Previous research has indicated that correlations between Piagetian and psychometric tests and chronological age are influenced by the size of the age range of the sample groups. To examine whether the size of the age range and mean age are related to the size of the correlations between Piagetian and arithmetic tests, Spearman rank-order…

Mathematics in the primary schools is discussed. This bulletin puts forth some suggestions to assist individual teachers in reaching their own decisions about changes and developments in the curriculum. The bulletin is divided into nine chapters. Two factors described in Chapter 1 and 2 support views expressed in the introduction. First, the…