This study aims to investigate the obstacles in eighth-grade students' understanding of integer exponents using a mixed method research design. A total of 165 eighth-grade students were given a paper-pencil task and clinical interviews were conducted with 12 students. The findings indicated that achievement of the participants was low, especially…

Comparing datasets, that is, sets of numbers in context, is a critical skill in higher order cognition. Although much is known about how people compare single numbers, little is known about how number sets are represented and compared. We investigated how subjects compared datasets that varied in their statistical properties, including ratio of…

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,…

This paper discusses a proposal for exploration and verification of numerical and algebraic behavior correspondingly to Generalized Fibonacci model. Thus, it develops a special attention to the class of Fibonacci quaternions and Fibonacci octonions and with this assumption, the work indicates an investigative and epistemological route, with…

Admittedly, the study of Complex Analysis (CA) requires of the student considerable mental effort characterized by the mobilization of a related thought to the complex mathematical concepts. Thus, with the aid of the dynamic system Geogebra, we discuss in this paper a particular concept in CA. In fact, the notion of winding number v[f(gamma),P] =…

Traditionally, "z" is assumed to be a complex number and the roots are usually determined by using de Moivre's theorem adapted for fractional indices. The roots are represented in the Argand plane by points that lie equally pitched around a circle of unit radius. The "n"-th roots of unity always include the real number 1, and…

This paper is a natural extension of the root visualisation techniques first presented by Bardell (2012) for quadratic equations with real coefficients. Consideration is now given to the familiar quadratic equation "y = ax[superscript 2] + bx + c" in which the coefficients "a," "b," "c" are generally…

Script writing by learners has been used as a valuable pedagogical strategy and a research tool in several contexts. We adopted this strategy in the context of a mathematics course for prospective teachers. Participants were presented with opposing viewpoints with respect to a mathematical claim, and were asked to write a dialogue in which the…

This note can be used to illustrate to the student such concepts as periodicity in the complex plane. The basic construction makes use of the Tent function which requires only that the student have some working knowledge of binary arithmetic.

The purpose of this article is to examine one possible extension of greatest common divisor (or highest common factor) from elementary number properties. The article may be of interest to teachers and students of the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics," beginning with Years 7 and 8, as described in the content descriptions for Number…

In this article, we obtain a genetic decomposition of students' progress in developing an understanding of the decimal 0.9 and its relation to 1. The genetic decomposition appears to be valid for a high percentage of the study participants and suggests the possibility of a new stage in APOS Theory that would be the first substantial change in…

Looking for, recognizing, and using underlying mathematical structure is an important aspect of mathematical reasoning. We explore the use of mathematical structure in children's integer strategies by developing and exemplifying the construct of logical necessity. Students in our study used logical necessity to approach and use numbers in a…

One crucial issue in mathematics development is how children come to spontaneously apply arithmetical principles (e.g. commutativity). According to expertise research, well-integrated conceptual and procedural knowledge is required. Here, we report a method composed of two independent tasks that assessed in an unobtrusive manner the spontaneous…

In this article, a simple exercise for finding groups isomorphic to the symmetry group of the real line is presented. A mechanism for producing metrics on the real line is used to construct the group elements, and these transformations, by construction, are isometries with respect to the generating metric.

The general purpose of this article is to shed some light on the understanding of real numbers, particularly with regard to two issues: the real number as the limit of a sequence of rational numbers and the development of irrational numbers as a continued fraction. By generalizing the expression of the golden ratio in the form of the limit of two…