Twenty-five first-year preservice teachers attending a university in the Midwest of the United States of America participated in a whole-class-setting study aimed at investigating their knowledge of how they made sense of fraction concepts and operations, and how the development of this knowledge was facilitated during a mathematics education…

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a cyclical, large-scale study of adult skills and life experiences focusing on education and employment. It is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and developed by participating countries with the support of the OECD. Between…

This paper explores the complex problem of project sustainability, focusing on the leadership of three primary school mathematics leaders. Using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), the leaders' efforts are reported, highlighting their contribution to project sustainability. The CHAT-informed research design supported the generation of…

Improving children's "number sense" has been a core component of recent mathematics curricular and instructional reforms (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000, 2014) in the United States. Students with mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient…

The Australian Council for Educational Research's submission to the Australian Government Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training's Public Enquiry into Adult literacy and its importance highlights the importance of these skills to Australia's well-being and economy, and calls on the government to continue participation in an…

Children's early mathematical abilities are fundamental to their later academic achievement. An interest in mathematics in the early years is likely to establish a positive attitude to later mathematical learning, hopefully sustaining continued interest in mathematics and mathematical learning. Approaches to early mathematics teaching in the early…

We share a subset of the 41 underlying strategies that comprise five ways of reasoning about integer addition and subtraction: formal, order-based, analogy-based, computational, and emergent. The examples of the strategies are designed to provide clear comparisons and contrasts to support both teachers and researchers in understanding specific…

This paper describes the main findings of a national action-research project, promoted by Regional School Office of Campania (South of Italy), aimed at improving numeracy and mathematical literacy through supporting schools' activities. The main focus is on processes underlying the creation of capabilities in representation, reasoning and…

This paper performs multivariate analysis of skill differences in four Nordic countries as assessed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey of adults aged 16-65. The differences in average skills between Finland and each of the three Scandinavian…

While many U.S. adult education programs and policies (including the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)) focus on low literacy skill as a barrier to employment, this study recognizes the role of increasing numeracy skill as critical in reducing the probability of unemployment. This study used a series of regression analyses to examine…

There is contrary research around whether collaboration at work fosters individual learning and skill development. This study's purpose was to examine the relationship between social characteristics of jobs on adults' cognitive skills as measured by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). For select industry…

With rising importance of collaborative problem-solving skills (CLPS) for the new information age, the PISA 2015 assessed students' CLPS skills on a large scale. This new attempt to measure CLPS raises an issue of validity. The purpose of this research is to examine evidence for convergent validity of CLPS through investigating the relationships…

This guide is designed for practitioners, including teachers, lead instructors, and professional developers, who are ready to take up the challenge to change how numeracy is taught in adult education. If instructors shift their teaching to focus more on the use of numeracy skills, they might find that their students not only score better on formal…

Building the Right Skills for Human Capital summarizes the findings from the 2019 skills survey for the adult Kyrgyz population. The skills measures used in the survey focused on literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology rich environments (PSTRE) and followed the same questions and approach as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation…

Background: Key to optimizing Computational Thinking (CT) instruction is a precise understanding of the underlying cognitive skills. Román-González et al. (2017) reported unique contributions of spatial abilities and reasoning, whereas arithmetic was not significantly related to CT. Disentangling the influence of spatial and numerical skills on CT…