This paper uses data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to analyze the relationship between U.S. adults' self-reported health and proficiencies in literacy, numeracy, and technological problem solving. Ordinal logistic regression analyses showed that scores on all three scales were positively and…

The purpose of this study was to compare subgroups of students with various forms of learning difficulties (< 25th percentile) on cognitive and mathematics characteristics. Students with mathematics difficulty (MD, n = 105), reading difficulty (RD, n = 65), both (MDRD, n = 87), or neither (NoLD, n = 403) were evaluated on an array of cognitive…

In this article, the authors illustrates techniques for integrating diverse learners in shared mathematical contexts while providing differentiated support or challenge, as necessary. The techniques described were developed for a curriculum project entitled Learning Mathematics through Representations (LMR). A premise of LMR is that students'…

Studies reveal that students as well as teachers have difficulties in understanding and learning of decimals. The purpose of this study is to investigate students' as well as pre-service teachers' solution strategies when solving a question that involves an estimation task for the value of a decimal number on the number line. We also examined the…

In the wake of the technological revolution that began in the last decades of the 20th century, labour market demand for information-processing and other high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills is growing substantially. The "Survey of Adult Skills," a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult…

This article offers a qualitative analysis of videotaped mathematics lessons taught by four teachers in a provincial university city in Finland. My study is framed not only by Finnish success on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) but also by the objectives of current mathematics education reform, which are consistent with PISA's…

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of class-wide applications of Taped Problems (TP) and Cover, Copy, and Compare (CCC) procedures designed to enhance subtraction fact fluency in an intact third-grade classroom. During the TP procedure, a tape provided an auditory prompt (i.e., the problem), followed by a…

In the health and life sciences and many other scientific disciplines, problem solving depends on mathematical skills. However, significant deficiencies are commonly found in this regard in undergraduate students. In an attempt to understand the underlying causes, and to improve students' performances, this article describes a ten-year survey…

Because of the impact that mathematical beliefs have on an individual's behaviour, they are generally well researched. However, little mathematical belief research has taken place in the field of adult education. This paper presents preliminary results from a study conducted in this field in Switzerland. It is based on Ernest's (1989) description…

Background: The PISA study (assessing the competences of 15-year-old students in their mother tongue, in mathematics and in natural sciences) deals with the benchmarking of the OECD member states when it comes to meeting globally defined educational standards. Transnational educational experts now form the most powerful group within the…

Students who complete kindergarten with an inadequate knowledge of basic mathematics concepts and skills will continue to experience difficulties with mathematics throughout their elementary and secondary years and may be at increased risk for math disabilities. There is a critical need to identify students experiencing difficulties in mathematics…

This paper shares research from a pilot study in which young children were introduced to multiplication and division problems in their first year of school. The focus was on building children's conceptual understanding of the idea of "repeated groups" as a fundamental aspect of multiplication and its relation to division. The particular…

This paper examines correspondences and disjunctions within a national curriculum and between various aspects of its delivery, and how these align with the mathematical needs of the workplace. This is investigated in the context of the New Zealand school mathematics curriculum; the Numeracy Development Project; the senior school assessment regime,…

Few studies on the role of bilingualism in mathematics classrooms explore the intersection of biliteracy, language use, mathematical discourse, and numeracy--especially at the middle school level. Drawing from biliteracy development theory and reform mathematics education literature, this qualitative case study of a dual-language mathematics…

A facility with signed numbers forms the basis for effective problem solving throughout developmental mathematics. Most developmental mathematics textbooks explain signed number operations using absolute value, a method that involves considering the problem in several cases (same sign, opposite sign), and in the case of subtraction, rewriting the…