This paper reports on five secondary school mathematics prospective teachers' conceptions of "extreme point." The analysis of the data addressed students' definitions, examples, and evaluation of given examples, with special attention to the related domain. Written assignments and individual interviews uncover salient, erroneous concept…

Graded Troubleshooting (GTS) is a powerful routine that teachers can use easily to engender students' metacognitive thinking and boost their understanding of mathematics concepts and procedures. This article describes a new GTS activity designed to prompt students to efficiently exploit worked examples when asked to diagnose erroneous examples…

Developing both conceptual and procedural knowledge is important for students' mathematics competence. This study examined whether U.S. Grade 9 general education mathematics teachers' self-reported use of concept-focused instruction (CFI) and procedure-focused instruction (PFI) were associated differently with ninth graders' algebra achievement…

Mathematics teachers have been documented as thinking of precision as a black-and-white issue that should be judged based on external expectations (Otten et al., 2019), suggesting that matters of precision align primarily with approaches to mathematics instruction that prioritize accuracy and speed. How can teachers who also value creativity and…

Inferentialism has emerged as a valuable theoretical resource in mathematics education. As a theory of meaning about the use and content of concepts, it offers a fresh perspective on traditional epistemological and linguistic questions in the field. Despite its emergence, important inferentialist ideas still need to be operationalized. In this…

In this article, the author shares two investigations that relate the variables of height and volume using different contexts. Each of the investigations surfaced unfinished learning for students, regardless of their starting place, and facilitated growth in understanding of measurement and algebra. The Functions and Volume of Vases task…

The notion of function is central in all of the secondary curriculum, and indeed functional models appear in almost all higher education that is based on mathematics. However, in secondary education, functions usually appear in restricted and somewhat sterile forms. In this (mostly theoretical) paper, we present a proposal -- exemplified by a…

Backward transfer is defined as the influence that new learning has on individuals' prior ways of reasoning. In this article, we report on an exploratory study that examined the influences that quadratic functions instruction in real classrooms had on students' prior ways of reasoning about linear functions. Two algebra classes and their teachers…

This article focuses on first-year university students' understanding of concepts related to third-degree polynomial and trigonometric functions that they encountered during their study of Grade 12 mathematics. In this study three online questions from two first-year mathematics quizzes at the University of KwaZulu-Natal were analysed. The first…

Optimization is introduced to teaching in secondary school, focussing on functions of one variable with the first derivative criterion for critical points and monotonicity of functions. The second derivative criterion is also used to determine the nature of the critical points. Similarly, in university-level teaching, algebraic work using criteria…

The current research aimed to unpack teachers' knowledge of integers by investigating how they used the number line and counter models to represent the two meanings of division (i.e., partitive and measurement). The participants were three middle school mathematics teachers working in different cities in Türkiye. Data consisted of teachers'…

Mental brackets constitute an idiosyncratic use of brackets sometimes used to evaluate arithmetic expressions and are closely connected with students' structure sense. The relevant literature describes the use of mental brackets focusing on primary school students and in the context of arithmetic. Using 181 high school students' solutions to seven…

Ben Zunica describes a lesson in which computational thinking has been successful in assisting students to understand the process of simplifying surds. The strengths and limitations of this approach are discussed. The author concludes that computational thinking can assist in solidifying understanding of a range of mathematical processes for…

This study examined "backward transfer," which we define as how students' ways of reasoning about previously encountered concepts are modified when learning about new concepts. We examined the backward transfer produced when students learned about quadratic functions. We were specifically interested in how backward transfer may vary for…

Problem-based instruction (PBI) is a research-based, student-centered instructional strategy that uses rich mathematical tasks to connect students' previously acquired math knowledge to new mathematical concepts. Unlike traditional teaching and learning strategies, PBI facilitates learning by making connections between mathematical concepts and…