This article explores the role that gestures play in the development of mathematical understanding. Using Pirie Kieren's (1994) notion of image making and Lunney Borden's (2011) idea of verbing mathematics, we share two examples of how students respond to teacher requests to demonstrate what they know about arrays.

A theoretical-didactic proposal based on variational ideas and the use of GeoGebra is described as a response to a local problem on the understanding of the concept of function and quadratic equation in pre-university students. The theoretical elements of this work are based on the understanding of concepts and the theory of semiotic registers and…

We investigated how two didactical tools assist high school students in constructing knowledge about convergence and limits. The first tool is manual plotting of the terms of selected sequences, and the second, a technological applet. Student pairs worked in an interview setting on an activity designed for the purpose of this research. The…

For teachers to provide students with meaningful instruction in area measurement, teachers need robust understandings of area. Here, I describe two cycles of a "lesson experiment" used to investigate prospective teachers' understandings of area units in an undergraduate mathematics class. For each cycle, I collected and analyzed the…

Background: Functional thinking is characterized as a specific way of thinking in relationships, dependencies, and changes. Hence, beyond mathematics, it is also crucial for other (STEM) disciplines as well as for everyday situations. In particular, dealing with different representations of functions and changing between them are core…

While patterning was commonly seen as evidence of mathematical thinking, interdisciplinary interest has recently increased due to pattern-recognition applications in artificial intelligence. Within two empirical studies, we analyze the analogical-transfer capability of primary school students when completing three types of bi-dimensional patterns,…

Early years mathematics textbooks are support material for teachers and learners as they contain visual representations which communicate and clarify mathematical concepts. In this paper, we report on the types and functions of visual representations of multiplication and division in South African early years mathematics textbooks. There seems to…

How dyslexia students solve number operations is still challenging to unravel. This study aimed at revealing the types of errors conveyed by a dyslexic student in performing fractional operations on mathematical tasks that combined non-verbal text (symbols and pictures) and verbal text. The data were collected using a task-based interview with a…

A mental model is a concept that exists in students' minds and is used to describe and explain a phenomenon. This study aims to describe the transition-attempting mental model of students in understanding the concept of integers. This study uses a qualitative approach and the type of research conducted is descriptive. The subjects of this study…

This article presents a networking of two theories, the Extended Theory of Mathematical Connections (ETC) and the Onto-semiotic Approach (OSA). In particular, concordances and complementarities are identified in the respective conceptions of mathematical connections, as a result of applying these theoretical frameworks to a student's response…

Mathematics is crucial to the educational and vocational success of students. The concrete-representational-abstract (CRA) approach is a method to teach students mathematical concepts. The CRA involves instruction with manipulatives, representations, and numbers only in different lessons (i.e., concrete lessons include manipulatives but not…

What does it mean to have mathematical authority? How does it differ from pedagogical authority? We drew upon Goffman's (1981) ideas of author and animator to exemplify modes of mathematical authority that extend beyond the authorship of ideas. Through a series of excerpts from lessons in middle-grades mathematics classrooms, this paper emphasizes…

Students in Manitoba have demonstrated a lower-than-average understanding of mathematics concepts. Two areas that contribute to this level of understanding are quality of instruction and math anxiety in students and teachers. Quality of instruction can be addressed through the intentional design of lessons around quality, deeper thinking tasks.…

The overwhelming presence of a procedural meaning of equality and equations reported in previous research has led to a call for suitable pedagogical interventions to nurture a relational meaning of these concepts. This paper is a response to that call. Drawing on the theory of objectification, the first part deals with the configuration of a Grade…

Adaptive serious mathematical games in kindergarten were used to investigate whether kindergarteners could grasp mathematics topics. A pretest-posttest-follow up design with two conditions. (Condition 1 educational kindergarten games on the computer, focusing on counting and comparison, Condition 2 educational kindergarten games on the computer,…