The basic notions of combinatorics, including systematic listing and permutations, are important topics of mathematics that are recommended to be learned eventually from elementary schools. However, there is little research in mathematics education regarding elementary students' combinatorial strategies. The purpose of this research is to…

This study examines the solutions of 34 kindergarten children as they create equal groups from n bottle caps, where n was equal to 8, 9, 22, and 23. For each n, children were asked to find as many different solutions as possible. The number of solutions they found, i.e., children's fluency, as well as the strategies used to create equal groups,…

Previous studies have emphasised that play can promote children's learning of mathematics. However, little research has been directed towards understanding how collective imaginary play motivates children's mathematical learning. Informed by the cultural-historical conception of play and motives, this paper examines how Conceptual PlayWorld (CPW)…

As early as first grade, some children are more likely than others to perform arithmetic using inefficient or other overt counting strategies. To partially address this problem, the primary investigator developed a skill hierarchy with procedures based on applied behavior analysis. The novel early-intervention program included a combination of…

This paper explores Year 3 Irish students' problem-solving strategies when responding to a skyscraper growing pattern problem. Students' strategies reveal their understandings of multiplicative thinking, pattern, and algebraic reasoning. The version of the growing pattern lesson was that a 'teaching through problem solving' approach was taken,…

This article focuses on students' meaning-making when working with mathematics textbooks from a multimodal approach that encompasses all resources for communication, which is an under researched area. Central to this study are the designed meanings of the textbooks and the affordances discovered by students when working with the textbooks. Video…

The National Association for Gifted Children and The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics both call for problem posing. This article illustrates the strategies used during a series of three Three-Act Tasks to foster second grade students' abilities to problem pose. The students' problem posing improved across the three Three-Act Tasks and…

This exploratory study determined the relationship between math instructional activities in Wave (year) 1 and English language learner (ELL) children's math problem-solving performance in Wave (year) 2. The math performance of ELL children (N = 291) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 was tested in two testing waves. Two major findings emerged. First, strategy…

This research aimed to examine whether the activities related to mental computation strategies had any effect on the development of the second-grade elementary school students' problem-solving (PS) skills. Participants of the study are comprised of 14 children aged 7-8 years and enrolled in the second grade of the elementary school of a village.…

The purpose of this meta-analysis is to examine the effect of problem-posing on students' mathematical academic outcomes, including problem-solving skills, problem-posing skills, mathematical dispositions, and mathematics achievement. Twenty-one studies that were published between 1990 and 2019 with problem-posing as the intervention were included…

This study presents a teaching experiment in which second-grade primary school students compared a city and a town according to population estimates. The activities were presented to them as Fermi problems and required an analysis of the reality to identify sub-problems that students could deal with. The students' products were analyzed from the…

This paper presents research that exists at the crossroad of scholarly practice and scholarly inquiry. We outline the process in the design, enactment, and empirical examination of an elementary methods course activity, Exploring and Supporting Student Thinking (ESST), which engaged 18 elementary prospective teachers (PTs) in two sessions of…

Children's literature can provide useful contexts for teaching mathematics. In this article, the authors discuss the use of the children's book "Measuring Penny" (Leedy 1997) to support Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (CCSSI 2010) related to length measurement. The authors first describe three types of misconceptions…

Elementary school children (ages 7-11) struggle to understand mathematical equivalence, a foundational prealgebraic concept. Some manipulations to the learning environment, including well-structured nontraditional arithmetic practice alone, have been shown to improve children's understanding; however, improvements have been modest. The goal of…

This study investigates kindergarten children's mathematics learning with a focus on the role of teachers' mathematics education and readiness beliefs, and home learning environment. Using structural equation modeling to estimate the individual differences in early mathematics learning, data from 5,845 kindergarteners was evaluated. Findings show…