Competence with rational numbers is essential for mathematics proficiency in secondary mathematics. However, many students struggle with rational number concepts, and students with mathematics difficulties struggle even more. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an intervention that incorporated the use of explicit instruction…

In this article we aim to deepen our understanding of the content and nature of the early childhood teacher's knowledge, focusing on those aspects which might promote students' algebraic thinking. Approaching arithmetic from the viewpoint of algebra as an advanced perspective and considering the analytical model "Mathematics Teachers'…

Number line models provide a visual aid for students to examine the relationship of integers with each other and facilitate learning of integers and integer operations. Such models are typically used when students are asked real-life problems. This study employs a qualitative case study design to perform an in-depth analysis of how middle grade…

A central issue in the mathematics curriculum is that we want students to make connections. This issue has been analysed in a series of curricula and instruction design and analysis studies. Moving towards mathematics connections--and away from treating mathematics as a body of isolated concepts and procedures--is an important goal of mathematics…

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…

We report a multidimensional test that examines middle grades teachers' understanding of fraction arithmetic, especially multiplication and division. The test is based on four attributes identified through an analysis of the extensive mathematics education research literature on teachers' and students' reasoning in this content…

The concept of exponents has been shown to be problematic for students, especially when expanding it from the domain of positive whole numbers to that of exponents that are negative and later rational. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the concept of exponentiation as a continuous operation and examines the deficiencies of existing…

We present findings from a study of prospective middle school teachers' reasoning as they transitioned from thinking arithmetically to thinking algebraically about even and odd numbers. Teachers were asked to make sense of and use two representations of even and odd numbers to model them and to make connections between the representations.…

This study was designed to investigate preservice elementary school teachers' (PSTs') responses to written standard place-value-operation tasks (addition and subtraction). Previous research established that PSTs can often perform but not explain algorithms and provided a four-category framework for PSTs' conceptions, two correct and two incorrect.…

This article describes a pilot study in which pre-service elementary teachers (PSTs) used rectangular area models on base-10 grid paper to begin making sense of multiplication of decimal fractions. Although connections were made to multi-digit whole number multiplication and to the distributive property, the PSTs were challenged by interpreting…

This document contains the fourth volume of the proceedings of the 28th annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Conference presentations are centered around the theme "Inclusion and Diversity". This volume features 64 research report papers: (1) Situated or Abstract: The Effect of…

The first volume of the 29th annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education contains plenary lecture and research forum papers as listed below. Short oral communications papers, poster presentations, brief summaries of discussion groups, and working sessions are also included in the volume. The plenary…