A growing body of research suggests that interventions promoting students' utility value for a subject can improve their academic outcomes. However, numerous questions remain regarding how much to adapt prior intervention materials to promote utility value in new educational contexts and how implementation constraints of an educational context may…

We discuss a teaching experiment that explored two pre-service secondary teachers' meanings for the unit circle. Our analyses suggest that the participants' initial unit circle meanings predominantly consisted of calculational strategies for relating a given circle to what they called "the unit circle." These strategies did not entail…

Because financial literacy is an important skill for middle-grades students, this article suggests numerous personal financial literacy tasks for use in the mathematics classroom. Also provided are specifics for implementing one of these tasks to address mathematical content.

This paper gives a short description of the scope and content of an educational project. The approach is to use historical navigational devices, such as sextants and cross staffs, to teach mathematics in secondary schools. By making collections of these devices available to teachers and bringing them into the class room a new approach to combine…

This article presents an interpretive analysis of three different mathematics teaching cases to establish where the bigger picture should lie in the teaching and learning of mathematics. We use pre-existing data collected through pre-observation and post-observation interviews and passive classroom observation undertaken by the third author in two…

This dissertation reports three studies of students' and teachers' meanings for quotient, fraction, measure, rate, and rate of change functions. Each study investigated individual's schemes (or meanings) for foundational mathematical ideas. Conceptual analysis of what constitutes strong meanings for fraction, measure, and rate of change is…

This quantitative non-experimental dissertation explores the impact of disruptive innovation theory in the form of computer-enhanced instruction (CEI) upon mathematics achievement. It also examines both teacher and student perceptions of CEI implementation in high school mathematics classrooms and the impacts of CEI upon student mathematics…

How can basic research on mathematics instruction contribute to instructional improvement? In our research on the practical rationality of geometry teaching we describe existing instruction and examine how existing instruction responds to perturbations. In this talk I consider the proposal that geometry instruction could be improved by infusing it…

This study investigated the extent to which access to technology resources influenced their adoption by mathematics teachers in their teaching. The study conducted in Nairobi County in the summer of 2013 applied Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory. Participants were categorized either as early or later adopters of technology based on…

This article demonstrates how to consider differentiating instruction for diverse learners while maintaining the cognitive demand of a mathematics task. The authors present scenarios involving hypothetical cases of students in inclusive classrooms who engaged in productive struggle within the differentiated task. The authors specifically focus on…

The purpose of this paper is to provide examples of "non-traditional" proof-related activities that can explored in a dynamic geometry environment by university and high school students of mathematics. These propositions were encountered in the dynamic geometry environment. The author believes that teachers can ask their students to…

Studies in mathematics education often point to the necessity for students to engage in more cognitively demanding activities than just solving tasks by applying given solution methods. Previous studies have shown that students that engage in creative mathematically founded reasoning to construct a solution method, perform significantly better in…

This article describes the implementation of a collaborative--competative pedagogy in a Year 10 class and the productive motivational outcomes that followed.

Secondary data analyses of large-scale international student assessment at the country level often reveal that educational systems which are high in academic achievement are found low in attitudinal outcomes of schooling, and vice versa. This is contrary to the non-negative attitude-achievement relationship frequently found at the student…

"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" is an 1884 novella written by English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott. He describes what it would be like to live in a two-dimensional (2D) world--Flatland. It is fascinating reading that underscores the challenge of teaching three-dimensional (3D) mathematics using 2D tools. Real-world applications of…