Early mathematics education presents middle-school students with the challenge of adding and subtracting negative integers. This paper reports on results from the experimental implementation of a proposed educational design for integer arithmetic that utilized the number-line (NL) form as a resource for students to enact simple addition and…

Background/purpose: Investigation into the misconceptions of preschool students in mathematics and their differences between the ages of 4-5 and 5-6 years old helps form appropriate developmental mathematics teaching programs. However, although several studies have been conducted examining preschoolers' previous knowledge and misconceptions about…

Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance…

Skills and understanding of operations with negative numbers, which are typically taught in middle school, are crucial aspects of numerical competence necessary for all subsequent mathematics. To more swiftly and coherently develop the field's understanding of how to foster this critical competence, we need shared measures that allow us to compare…

The "Reasoning Algebraically about Operations Casebook" was developed as the key resource for participants' Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar experience. The thirty-four cases, written by teachers describing real situations and actual student thinking in their classrooms, provide the basis of each session's investigation into the…

Teachers and mathematicians hold different perspectives on the teaching and learning of whole number arithmetic. Though these perspectives may be complementary, sharing them across communities is challenging. An unusual professional development course for primary school teachers, initiated and taught by research mathematicians, provided a setting…

Practicing teachers as well as researchers, mathematicians, and teacher educators have offered opinions and theoretical critiques of the multiple models used to teach integer arithmetic. Few studies, however, have investigated what students learn with models or empirically compared affordances and constraints of integer models. This led me to…

Mathematically speaking, a "difference" is the result of a subtraction. However, when the number domain is extended from natural numbers to integers, the separation of the magnitude of a number from its value creates "different differences," where the connection to subtraction is no longer straightforward. Based on…

Recognizing and using mathematical structure are key components of mathematical reasoning. The authors believe that one productive way to support students' use of structure is by identifying opportunities to address structure in the context of what teachers are already doing, rather than developing additional tasks or new curriculum materials. The…

Understanding signed quantities and its arithmetic is one of the challenging topics of middle school mathematics. The "specialized content knowledge" (SCK) for teaching integers includes understanding of a variety of representations that may be used while teaching. In this study, we argue that meanings of integers and integer operations…

There is a call for enabling students to use a range of efficient mental and written strategies when solving addition and subtraction problems. To do so, students should recognise numerical structures and be able to change a problem to an equivalent problem. The purpose of this article is to suggest an activity to facilitate such understanding in…

Algorithms and representations have been an important aspect of the work of mathematics, especially for understanding concepts and communicating ideas about concepts and mathematical relationships. They have played a key role in various mathematics standards documents, including the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. However, there have…

Kayla was a 15 years old girl with Down syndrome attending a special education school in Indonesia. A modification of Wright et al.'s (2006) approach to assessment documented her number knowledge and arithmetical strategies. This paper discusses the assessment process and the results focusing on her ability to solve number problems. Results show…

The Common Core State Standards Initiative stresses the importance of developing a geometric and algebraic understanding of complex numbers in their different forms (i.e., Cartesian, polar and exponential). Unfortunately, most high school textbooks do not offer such explanations much less exercises that encourage students to bridge geometric and…

The transition from whole numbers to integers involves challenges for both students and teachers. Leadership in mathematics education calls for an ability to translate depth of understanding into effective teaching methods, and this landscape includes alternative treatments of familiar topics. Noting the multiple meanings associated with the…