Struggling math students often have difficulty developing a sense of self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation to learn math, which has been found to predict future math achievement (Pitsia et al., 2017). Conventional methods of math instruction and assessment may provoke elevated levels of math anxiety for many students, which has been found to…

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics ("CCSSM") explicitly states many specific theorems for students to prove across multiple domains (i.e., congruence, similarity, circles, and coordinates) in high school geometry. This study examined five high school geometry textbooks for how they approached proof of 17 theorems stated in…

Students often have the misconception that mathematics involves reading the problem, staring at the page, and then writing down an answer. With more than twenty years of experience working with students in eighth-grade math through college calculus, the author has been increasingly interested in how she can foster problem-solving skills in her…

Geometric transformations have long been topics of middle school mathematics. Generations of middle school students have learned to reflect, rotate, and translate geometric objects. Historically, though, the mathematics of "movement" might have been considered a departure from other more central middle-grades geometric content areas,…

Surveys were used to examine mathematics teachers (15) on their ability to solve similarity problems and on their likely implementation of lesson objectives for teaching similarity. All correctly solved a similarity problem requiring a traditional static perspective, but 7 out of 15 failed to correctly solve a problem that required a more…

The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) represent a major attempt in a long line of attempts to reform the American Education system surrounding Mathematics. These standards aim to establish a nationwide set of curriculum, seeking to ensure equity for all students in the U.S.A. Some of the standards included are new to all teachers…

This book's 28 chapters are adapted and updated from articles published in NCTM's "Journal for Research in Mathematics Education" between 2000 and 2010. The authors have rewritten and revised their work to make it clear, understandable, and--most of all--useful for mathematics teachers today. To help teachers even more, these articles…

We propose the development of a "population" of high-quality assessment tasks that cover the performance goals set out in the "Common Core State Standards for Mathematics." The population will be published. Tests are drawn from this population as a structured random sample guided by a "balancing algorithm."

Last year the United States unveiled the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English and Mathematics for grades K-12. In particular, the authors included two possible sequences of 8-12 mathematics courses that would fulfill the standards. Most notably, the courses titled "3a" and "3b" in these two sequences have become…