Gestures are one of the ways in which mathematical cognition is embodied and have been elevated as a potentially important semiotic device in the teaching of mathematics. As such, a better understanding of gestures used during mathematics instruction (including frequency of use, types of gestures, how they are used, and the possible relationship…

Mastery of the cardinality principle (CP) is foundational for children's mathematical development. Children's age and subitizing and counting skills contribute to their CP acquisition. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of different types of instruction for supporting 3-4-year-olds' CP development and its interplay with child…

Research literature about visually impaired students' approach to mathematics is still very scarce, especially in the case of algebra, even though mathematical content is becoming increasingly accessible thanks to assistive technologies. This paper presents a case study aimed at describing a blind subject's process of algebraic symbol manipulation…

The literature reports that students have difficulties connecting different meanings, multiple representations of the derivative, and performing reversibility processes between representations of f and f'. The research goal is to analyze the mathematical connections that university students establish when solving tasks that involve the graphs of f…

This study identifies language specific errors made with transcoding tasks to inform possible future pedagogic decisions regarding the language used when teaching early number. We compared children aged 5-7 years from Kuwait and England. The spoken Arabic language of Kuwait gave the opportunity to compare not only languages where the tens and…

One typical challenge in algebra education is that many students justify the equivalence of expressions only by referring to transformation rules that they perceive as arbitrary without being able to justify these rules. A good algebraic understanding involves connecting the transformation rules to other characterizations of equivalence of…

In mathematics education, students are repeatedly confronted with the tasks of interpreting and relating different representations. In particular, switching between equations and diagrams plays a major role in learning mathematical procedures and solving mathematical problems. In this article, we investigate a rather unexplored topic with…

This study is focused on the relational thinking of first-grade students following their first 3 months of instruction from the Measure Up (MU) curriculum, an adaptation of the El'konin-Davydov curriculum. Following Davydov's outline of instructional material, the MU first-grade materials were designed to have students identify the quantitative…

When a number sentence includes more than one operation, students are taught to follow the rules for the order of operations to get the correct result. In this context, brackets are used to determine the operations that should be calculated first. However, it seems that the written format of an arithmetical expression has an impact on the way…

Decades of research have documented young students' misinterpretations of the equal sign and the impediments these present for children's mathematical development. Much less is known about individual differences in adults' knowledge of the equal sign. We assessed 182 college students from developmental math courses and present analyses from a…

Students in secondary school often struggle with symbol sense, that is, the general ability to deal with symbols and to recognize the structure of algebraic formulas. Fostering symbol sense is an educational challenge. In graphing formulas by hand, defined as graphing using recognition and reasoning without technology, many aspects of symbol sense…

The use of artifacts to introduce the distributive law of multiplication over addition in primary school is a diffused approach: it is possible to find pre-constructed learning trajectories in instructional materials. However, it is still unclear how the teacher might support his/her students in transitioning from concrete to symbolic…

We report a study on mathematical literacy with special emphasis on health literacy. In particular, we identify and characterize the mathematical competencies that a citizen needs to interpret the official information on the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in Mexico. To achieve this, we analyze the daily reports on the pandemic issued by the…

Some errors in the learning of algebra suggest that students might have difficulties giving meaning to algebraic symbolism. In this paper, we use problem posing to analyze the students' capacity to assign meaning to algebraic symbolism and the difficulties that students encounter in this process, depending on the characteristics of the algebraic…

Secondary-tertiary transition issues are explored from the perspective of ways of doing mathematics that are constituted in the implicit aspects of teachers' action. Theories of culture (Hall, 1959) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) provide us with a basis for describing and explicating the ways of doing mathematics specific to each teaching…