Elementary students' early development of embedding and disembedding is complex and paves the way for later STEM learning. The purpose of this study was to clarify the factors that support students' embedding (i.e., overlapping shapes to form a new shape) and disembedding (i.e., identifying discrete shapes within another shape) through the use of…

The Science of Reading era has (re)ignited conversations about equitable literacy instruction. Conflicting literacy research and literacy media reports complicate matters further. Guided reading, a ubiquitous form of small group instruction designed to meet readers' needs through individualized conferring and independent reading with…

This study aimed to examine the diagrammatic representation skills and problem-solving performances of students according to their problem-solving representations. A cross-sectional survey design using quantitative methods was used in this study. The sample consisted of 31 second-grade and 41 third-grade students from a public primary school in…

The aim of this longitudinal research is to examine the development process of scientific and consistent knowledge structures of first, second, and third-grade students in middle school within the concepts of melting and dissolution according to conceptual change theories at the end of the education and training processes carried out in…

Schema instruction improves word-problem solving for students with mathematics difficulty (MD; e.g., Powell et al., 2015); however, prior research suggests that students need word-problem-specific language comprehension in addition to schema knowledge to build word-problem models (Fuchs et al., 2015, 2018). Students have general word knowledge…

Background: Initial teacher education (ITE) research in South Africa shows gaps in preservice teachers' (PSTs) primary mathematics knowledge. Aim: We study the mental mathematics understandings and teaching experiences of three PSTs who achieved high gains for learners they taught mental mathematics to using the Mental Starters Assessment Project…

Schema-based instruction (SBI) is a word problem solving strategy that teaches students to identify problem types by focusing on the underlying structure of the mathematical situation. SBI is gaining an evidence-base for students with a specific learning disability; however, few experimental studies have evaluated the effects of SBI for students…

The purpose of this study is to determine the mental models of primary school students about the concept of environment. The research group consisted of 400 students, 219 girls and 181 boys, enrolling to the 3rd and 4th grade in a primary school located in Istanbul. The students were asked to draw the environment and explain the items they draw.…

Word problem solving skills include complex skills. Teaching word problem solving skills to students with disabilities is more difficult compared to their peers with typical development. Therefore, effective interventions need to be determined in order to teach these skills to students with disabilities. The purpose of this study is to analyze the…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a skill of social cognition recently of interest to literacy researchers. This article presents initial findings from a pilot study investigating the use of ToM to teach theme identification and theme statement formation to beginning readers who are less-skilled in comprehension. The authors designed a brief, 1:1 listening…

Students in the elementary grades often experience difficulty setting up and solving word problems. Using an equation to represent the structure of the problem serves as an effective tool for solving word problems, but students may require specific pre-algebraic reasoning instruction about the equal sign as a relational symbol to set up and solve…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine whether positive results from a word-problem intervention implemented one-to-one contributed to similar outcomes when implemented in small groups of three to four students. Third-grade students experiencing mathematics difficulty (n = 76) were randomly assigned to word-problem intervention (n = 56)…

The purpose of this study was to explore the paths by which word-problem intervention, with versus without embedded pre-algebraic reasoning instruction, improves word-problem performance. Students with mathematics difficulty (MD; n = 304) were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual condition or one of two variants of word-problem intervention.…

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children's scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students' pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a…

Mathematical word problems are the most common form of mathematics problem solving implemented in K-12 schools. Identifying key words is a frequent strategy taught in classrooms in which students struggle with problem solving and show low success rates in mathematics. Researchers show that using the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA)…