Evidence in South Africa of poor performance on word problems points to particular challenges among learners relating to difficulties with, on the one hand, making sense of mathematical word problems and, on the other, moving beyond inefficient counting based calculation methods. While many studies in mathematics education in South Africa have…

Pre-service mathematics teachers' content knowledge is an important issue. Therefore, detailed studies are needed to be conducted on mathematical topics. The study examines preservice elementary mathematics teachers' (PEMTs) special content knowledge (SCK) of integer addition and subtraction in the context of using multiple representations,…

There is a call for enabling students to use a range of efficient mental and written strategies when solving addition and subtraction problems. To do so, students should recognise numerical structures and be able to change a problem to an equivalent problem. The purpose of this article is to suggest an activity to facilitate such understanding in…

This paper analyses the strategies used by pre-service primary school teachers for solving simple addition problems involving negative numbers. The findings reveal six different strategies that depend on the difficulty of the problem and, in particular, on the unknown quantity. We note that students use negative numbers in those problems they find…

This paper reports an intervention phase of a design study aimed to assist second-grade Filipino children in solving addition word problems in English, a language they primarily encounter only in school. With Filipino as the medium of instruction, an out-of-school pedagogical intervention providing linguistic and representational scaffolds was…

This paper is aimed at depicting the quality of functions of some of the aspects of attention in children with mild intellectual disabilities and their influence on the mastering of arithmetic operations, including addition and subtraction. The sample used in this study encompasses 60 pupils, both males and females. The criteria used in the…

Textbooks, like many other resources teachers have at hand, are meant to be an aid for instruction; however there is little research with textbooks or on their potential to develop metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive knowledge has received substantial attention in the literature, in particular for its relationship with problem-solving in…

This brief report compares the lessons on addition and subtraction of signed whole numbers in three seventh-grade Japanese mathematics texts and four U.S. mathematics texts. Japanese books contained many more worked-out examples and relevant illustrations, while U.S. books had more irrelevant illustrations and unsolved problems. (SLD)