The purpose of this article is to elaborate Cottrill et al.'s (1996) conceptual framework of limit, an explanatory model of how students might come to understand the limit concept. Drawing on a retrospective analysis of 2 teaching experiments, we propose 2 theoretical constructs to account for the students' success in formulating and understanding…

Ten- and 11-year-old boys and girls were taught to solve Inhelder and Piaget's pendulum problem and the results of the experiment replicated their expectation that unaided 10- and 11-year-olds do not often solve the pendulum problem. (Editor/RK)

This report is part of a long-term research on the construction of mathematical meanings through the interaction with various technologies. The research involved a set of teaching experiments based on body motion with sensors and calculators at different school levels, from kindergarten to secondary school. Here I refer to the one developed in a…

Students set in their ways are usually reluctant, as a general rule, to deal with open-ended investigative scenarios. In order to acquaint the student with the physical method and philosophical thought process of the discipline, the tone of the course must be set early on. The present study was conducted to develop scenarios and microbial model…

Developmental assumptions that are frequently regarded as constraints on elementary school science curricula are analyzed. The argument that elementary school children cannot function as experimentalists because they have not yet attained formal operational thought is not supported by the Piagetian or non-Piagetian research reviewed. (SLD)

This paper examines ways in which coherent reasoning about key concepts such as variability, sampling, data, and distribution can be developed as part of statistics education. Instructional activities that could support such reasoning were developed through design research conducted with students in grades 7 and 8. Results are reported from a…