In the present study, we illuminate students' multiplicative reasoning in the context of their units-coordinating activity. Of particular interest is to investigate students' use of three levels of units as given material for problem-solving activity, which we regard as supporting a more advanced level of multiplicative reasoning. Among 13 middle…

Mathematical coherence is a goal within the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. One aspect of this coherence is how student mathematical thinking is developed across concepts. Unfortunately, mathematics is often taught as isolated ideas across grades. The multiplicative field is an area of study that needs to be examined as a space to…

Constructing multiplicative reasoning is critical for students' learning of mathematics, particularly throughout the middle grades and beyond. Tzur, Xin, Si, Kenney, and Guebert [American Educational Research Association, ERIC No. ED510991, (2010)] conclude that an assimilatory composite unit is a conceptual spring to multiplicative reasoning.…

This study aims to analyze and to describe, in terms of information processing theory, the thinking processes of junior high school students as they solved problems involving direct and inverse proportions. This study design is qualitative and exploratory-descriptive in nature. 26 students in the seventh grade of SMP Negeri 1 Kota Ternate were…

Teachers need ways to efficiently assess students' cognitive understanding. One promising approach involves easily adapted and administered item types that yield quantitative scores that can be interpreted in terms of whether or not students likely possess key understandings. This study illustrates an approach to analyzing response process…

Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

When teaching the multiplicative domain in New Zealand primary schools, teachers tend to spend a greater proportion of time on the meaning and processes of multiplication, to the detriment of a specific focus on understanding the concept of division. When division is taught, it tends to be by reversing the context and turning the division…

In the present study, researchers used problem-posing instruction to examine elementary students' understanding of multiplication. Students in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (n = 24) from a rural school district participated in a semester-long study. The focus of this study was examining student solutions to two specific lessons with problems…

The aim of this study was to examine the proportional reasoning skills of seventh-grade students before and after the implementation of STEM activities involving proportional and non-proportional relationships. Case study, one of the qualitative study methods, was used in the research. The data for the study was obtained from eight students. Seven…

Teacher knowledge is one of the main factors in the quality of mathematics learning. Many mathematics teachers have difficulty using proportional reasoning. Proportional reasoning is one of the essential aspects of the middle school mathematics curriculum to develop students' mathematical thinking. Teachers should realize that developing…

This paper draws on numerous data sources to better understand the shift from additive to multiplicative thinking in years 4 to 9. Research studies that have used the Scaffolding Numeracy in the Middle Years assessment tasks have found that while students can be supported to move through the early and upper zones of the Learning and Assessment…

Visualising positive and negative numbers on a number line is helpful for exploring problems involving operations with positive and negative numbers. This is because number lines lend themselves to exploring problems involving continuous linear contexts such as travelling distances and temperature. Teachers in a professional development program…

Background: Adaptive expertise is a highly valued outcome of mathematics curricula. One aspect of adaptive expertise with rational numbers is adaptive rational number knowledge, which refers to the ability to integrate knowledge of numerical characteristics and relations in solving novel tasks. Even among students with strong conceptual and…

Two-hour long developmental teaching interviews were conducted with each of 14 sixth grade students, ages 11-12. The purposes of the interviews were to investigate how students solved arrangement problems (APs), and how their solutions of these problems differed from their solution of Cartesian product problems (CPPs). The 14 students represented…

A growing body of literature supports the effectiveness of Modified Schema-Based Instruction (MSBI) to improve mathematical problem-solving for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID). MSBI is an intervention package that teaches students to identify the problem structure and use a problem-solving heuristic to…