Our bodies help us learn, and our bodies may know something before we can articulate it. Embodied explorations are body-based learning experiences where learners have opportunities to make sense of and convey ideas with their bodies. These embodied explorations were taught at a suburban public high school, in the southern United States, that…

This paper shares a flexible activity for engaging people in mathematical inquiry that does not depend on fixed prior knowledge built on a famous property of Möbius strips. The discussion includes the implementation of the activity and its extensions, facilitator moves and common participant thinking, suggestions for adaptation and integration…

The short activity presented in this article continues a discussion related to the value of golden ratio explorations in secondary mathematics, and acts as a companion to the earlier paper in this journal (Crawley, 2023). Exploring meaningful ways in which teachers can elicit students' interest and engagement in mathematics is vital, and…

In this report we show an investigation of how high-school students learn strategies to find intermediate numbers in an interval to understand the property of numerical density. Research has shown that some high-school students have difficulty in understanding this property. To mitigate this difficulty, we proposed a Hypothetical Learning…

This paper reports on the design, implementation, and evaluation processes of an activity that focused on the comparison meaning of the subtraction of integers and included the number line model as the primary representation. Finding the answer and determining the sign of the answer in the subtraction questions were targeted as the learning…

In this article, the history of the golden ratio is discussed to demonstrate how exploring this ratio would be of value in a secondary mathematics classroom. Following this, a mathematical activity related to the golden ratio that is suitable for students from Year 7 to Year 12 is outlined.

In this article, we use a case study to explore the views of first-year university students on the differences between mathematics at school and at university, and on the changes to their study methods as they make the transition to university mathematics. We also consider their views on the differences and affordances of tasks that they encounter…

This article explains how explorations into the quadratic formula can offer students opportunities to learn about the structure of algebraic expressions. In this article, the author leverages the graphical interpretation of the quadratic formula and describes an activity in which students derive the quadratic formula by quantifying the symmetry of…

We propose a divisibility criterion for elements of a generic Unique Factorization Domain. As a consequence, we obtain a general divisibility criterion for polynomials over Unique Factorization Domains. The arguments can be used in basic algebra courses and are suitable for building classroom/homework activities for college and high school…

The surface area of a sphere as a function of radius, "r," is a derivative of the volume of the sphere, and a few other families of solids with this property are known. Sometimes, the derivative relationship can be reached with a tricky choice of size parameter "r." This paper presents an activity for students that discovers…

In mathematics, there are countless connections between apparently unrelated topics. Students often find these relationships interesting, and they contribute to expanding their mathematical repertoires. This article describes one of these unusual connections, between the sum of periodic functions and the commensurable and incommensurable numbers.…

Off You Go is a PK-12 mathematical routine that leverages children's home resources and assets to help students take a concept with which they have initial or informal understanding and explore and test its boundaries to support defining or estimating with precision. The authors provide a guide for how to adapt this routine to engage students at…

Inherent in the Common Core's Standard for Mathematical Practice to "look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning" (SMP 8) is the idea that students engage in this practice by generalizing (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010). In mathematics, generalizing involves "lifting" and communicating about ideas at a level where the…

We present a model for describing the growth of students' understandings when reading a proof. The model is composed of two main paths. One is focused on becoming aware of the deductive structure of the proof, in other words, understanding the proof at a semantic level. Generalization, abstraction, and formalization are the most important…

In this article, the authors describe how a theoretical framework--the modeling cycle of Bliss, Fowler, and Galluzzo (2014)--came to life in their classroom as students struggled with an open-ended modeling task. The authors share their high school students' work--warts and all. They explain how they used their students' ideas and errors to help…