We investigated teachers' understanding of the Mathematical Practices (MPs; National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & the Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) and the Mathematics Teachers Practices (MTPs; NCTM, 2014) using a Vignette Activity Sequence within a professional development setting with our Professional…

How do teachers account for homework-related inequalities? Our longitudinal ethnographic study reveals that, despite awareness of structural inequalities in their students' lives, elementary- and middle-school teachers' practices centered the myth of meritocracy. They treat struggles with math homework as products of students' and (particularly in…

The adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (CCSSI 2010) has caused a shift in the expectations for student learning, with implications for teaching. It has also introduced a new kind of standard focused on the way that students think about content in the form of the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP). The SMP…

Many students struggle with algebra, from simplifying expressions to solving systems of equations. Students also have misconceptions about the meaning of variables. In response to the question "Can x + y + z ever equal x + p + z?" during a student interview, the student claimed, "Never . . . because p has to have a different value…

Do your students think a triangle can be constructed from any three given line segments? Do they believe that a transformation affects only the pre-image--not the whole plane? Do they understand that examples--no matter how many they find--cannot prove a conjecture but one counterexample is sufficient to disprove it? "What tasks can you…

Due to poor student success rates in developmental mathematics, many institutions have implemented various forms of redesign into their developmental math curricula. Since the goal of redesign is to increase student success, it is salient to explore all aspects of the redesign process. Many studies have focused on the positive outcomes of redesign…

Adoption of the Common Core State Standards present challenges to school districts, school administrators, and teachers. To assist in this endeavor, we present our work on unpacking the CCSS-M for the length, area, and volume Learning Trajectory (LT). The overarching theme of "genetic epistemology" and a five-characteristic framework…

Mathematics teachers face a myriad of instructional obstacles. Since the early 1990s, mathematics education researchers have proposed the use of constructivist practices to counteract these ever-prevalent obstacles. While we do give credit to the choices of instructional activities the constructivist paradigm promotes, there are problems with its…

With our conceptualization of Harre and van Langenhove's (1999) positioning theory, we draw attention to immanent experience and read transcendent discursive practices through the moment of interaction. We use a series of spatial images as metaphors to analyze the way positioning is conceptualized in current mathematics education literature and…

Drawing conclusions from the comparison of datasets using informal statistical inference is a challenging task since the nature and type of reasoning expected is not fully understood. In this paper a secondary teacher's reasoning from the comparison of box plot distributions during the teaching of a Year 11 (15-year-old) class is analyzed. From…