Determining what students know and understand, as well as what misconceptions they have, is essential to planning and providing targeted intervention and support. In this article, a teacher uses formative assessment interviews to uncover evidence of students' understandings and to plan targeted instruction in a mathematics intervention class. The…

This article is concerned with cognitive aspects of students' struggles in situations in which familiar concepts are reconsidered in a new mathematical domain. Examples of such cross-curricular concepts are divisibility in the domain of integers and in the domain of polynomials, multiplication in the domain of numbers and in the domain of vectors,…

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into 30, first year calculus students' understanding of the relationship between the concept of vertex of a quadratic function and the concept of the derivative. APOS (action-process-object-schema) theory was applied as a guiding framework of analysis on student written work, think-aloud and follow up…

In this article, attempts were made to examine students' thinking about the concepts of infinity and their ideas about transiting from finite to infinite states through the concept of limits of sequences. The participants included 78 senior high-school students ranging in age between 17 and 19 years old. The data were collected through a…

This article is concerned with tensions that teachers who are studying for a graduate degree in mathematics education experience when conducting a research project. Specifically, we focused on the tensions that emerge in situations where teacher-researchers encounter the mathematical misconceptions and difficulties of their interviewees. The…

This study aimed at investigating two main issues related to counterexample construction: the appropriateness of counterexamples and the types of arguments that are often used when refuting a false conjecture. Twelve pre-service elementary teachers who demonstrated a wide range of reasoning skills participated in this study. The data revealed…

One area of algebraic thinking essential for students' success is a relational understanding of the equal sign. Research has indicated a positive correlation between students' relational understanding of the equal sign and their equation-solving performance, suggesting that students' early conception of the equal sign may affect their learning and…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) highlight the importance of students' conceptual understanding, mathematical reasoning, and problem solving in order to prepare students for college and careers. However, the success of this reform effort largely depends on how teachers actually design and implement instruction based on the…

Results from a study of 16 community college students are presented. The research question concerned how students reasoned about p-values. Students' approach to p-values in hypothesis testing was procedural. Students viewed p-values as something that one compares to alpha values in order to arrive at an answer and did not attach much meaning to…

Based on a study with six elementary school teachers and 115 students in grades 3, 4, and 5, this article discusses ways that teachers might support an understanding of variable as students explore pattern-finding activities. The practices emerged from interviews with teachers and a yearlong observation of teaching algebraic thinking during an…

This study examined processes at the core of teacher professional development (PD) experiences that might positively impact teacher learning and more specifically teacher change. Four processes were considered in the context of a PD program focused on student mathematical errors: analysis of students' mathematical misconceptions as a lever for…

In this study, I examine how using a writers' workshop model in mathematics creates a space for students to write about their mathematical thinking and problem solving and how their writing impacts instruction. This case study of one classroom with one teacher spanned 6 weeks and included 18 implementations of an adapted version of the Writers'…

Central in the frameworks proposed to capture the knowledge needed for teaching mathematics is the assumption that teachers need more than pure subject-matter knowledge. Validation studies exploring this assumption by recruiting contrasting populations are relatively scarce. Drawing on a sample of 644 Greek-Cypriots preservice and inservice…

A story problem about borrowing money, presented in this article, may be represented with positive or negative numbers and thought about in different ways. The authors describe ideas related to integers (both positive and negative) and how students used them in relation to a story problem, and how they related these ideas to equations.

The purpose of this research was to explore to what extent probing learners' errors on simplifying algebraic fractions would help them to reduce those errors. The study assumed that students' errors and misconceptions persist because they handle mathematical concepts as if they were isolated chunks of knowledge. A sample of 15 grade 10 girls took…