Our mental representation of the infinite has received little research attention in cognitive psychology. In countably infinite sets, the infinity symbol (8) is presumed to be perceived as larger than any finite natural number. The present study sought to explore if the infinity symbol is processed as "larger than" natural numbers, and,…

Play is one of the most widely used teaching strategies in Foundation Phase. Grade 3 is the exit grade off the Foundation Phase in the South African context. This paper is an output of a Masters' dissertation that explored the use of play when teaching number sense to Grade 3 learners. The dissertation findings encouraged the researchers to…

Place value is one of the 'big ideas' in number and plays a critical role in helping students develop their number sense, problem solving and computation skills. Yet, the elegant simplicity of our place value system belies the abstract nature of the construct. This paper presents data from 606 Year 3-6 students (ages 8-12) from two metropolitan…

Young children need to be taught using effective interventions. A good teaching method is one that will increase children's motivation to learn, keep them aware of their understanding and encourage them to reflect on what they learn, if this teaching is based on relevant and visible training. Otherwise, they may suffer from delays in mathematics.…

Fractions remain a challenging area of school mathematics at every stage of education, with impacts that extend far beyond the school years. For this study, researchers engaged in classroom-based design research over a 6-year period to investigate effective strategies for teaching fractions with Canadian students. Participants included 86 teachers…

This study aims to determine the effect of the cognitive conflict approach on the elimination of misconceptions in square root numbers. For this purpose, this study was conducted with 8th-grade students of a secondary school in a region of Turkey. A three tiered diagnostic test was used to determine the impact of the 5-step cognitive conflict…

In this paper we compare the early years mathematics curricula of Germany, South Africa, and Australia in relation to the place value concept. Place value is an important topic as it underpins much of the number work completed by learners in the early years of schooling. We found that there were differences between the three curricula that could…

This paper presents a study based on didactic engineering and the theory of didactical situations on the complexification of the Leonardo sequence, addressing its numbers in a two-dimensional way, with the insertion of the imaginary unit "i". This study is an excerpt from a masters' thesis research done in the postgraduate programme in…

We discuss the importance of bringing teaching to the forefront of instructional design. We do so by describing the process of developing an instructional sequence for early number, using design research. The instructional sequence was developed with the specific aim of supporting teaching, conceived as a complex and demanding job, not reducible…

The Numeracy Kit for Kindergarten 5-Year-Olds (NyKK-5) is a tool to support kindergarten teachers' numeracy practices. Based on a pedagogy of enactment, the NyKK-5 was designed to simulate the types of in-class supports that have been identified as critical elements of effective mathematics professional development (PD). Two groups of teachers…

This qualitative case study aims to address the ways that pre-service mathematics teachers (PSTs) used a rope in a daylong research meeting for cognitive development of children's understanding of counting numbers in Tanzanian elementary schools. Three university mathematics pre-service teachers volunteered participating in this study. Collective…

Research on mathematical equivalence, and to some extent, on number structure in early grade mathematics, has shown that most students at primary and secondary levels understand these concepts instrumentally rather than relationally. The study reported in this paper uses a design research approach to explore both mathematical equivalence and…

This paper reports on an experiment involving 108 sixth-grade French students in which the history of Chinese numeration was used in mathematics education. The aim of this study is to evaluate the relevance of using ancient number systems in mathematics education, which is common in French textbooks. In the experiment a pre-test with usual…

Place value is a foundational competency for primary school mathematics and for this reason we have sought to investigate what the recent and current academic conversations are around this important concept. In this paper we present a survey of literature presented in the Australasian, European and Southern African contexts through a review of…

This paper focuses on how Inuit students responded to a Southern mathematics teaching strategy, known as number talks, in a Nunavut elementary school. Research on the effectiveness of number talks has been conducted in the elementary context (Boaler, 2015; Murata et al., 2017), yet there is little research that focuses on Inuit students'…