There is currently a debate as to whether academic content at kindergarten crowds out time spent in creative arts, free play, and physical activity. Analyzing kindergarten teachers' reports of their instruction from the ECLS-K:2011, this study examined whether core academic content or advanced academic content in math or English language arts…

The purpose of this study was to explore the differences in proficiency levels on the Illinois Assessment for Readiness (IAR) for schools using traditional grading methods versus standards-based grading methods. The researcher was interested in which grading method was associated with a high percentage of students scoring a (4) meet expectations…

Working with approximations is a common practice in physics. This paper presents an exploratory study of student understanding of some of the elementary aspects of approximations encountered in college physics. For this purpose, a questionnaire (a set of 14 multiple-choice questions) was developed to probe how students dealt with these aspects in…

There is a body of literature reporting that pre-K programs have significantly large effects on student academic performance in later years. Also, economically disadvantaged students who attended high-quality public pre-K programs were reported to have better academic outcomes than those who attended lower-quality programs. This study conducted…

The general expectation for many successful educational innovations is to "scale up" the project. Based on interviews with participating teachers, facilitators and administrators, this research shares findings from the "scaling up" stage of a federally funded mathematics project designed to help teachers reach a wide range of…

The Price is Right Bidder's Row and games provide many opportunities for mathematical connections. The Price is Right website has videos or pictures for students to see how each game is played (http://www.priceisright.com/games/). This article will describe the mathematics of probability and statistics that is integrated in the famous television…

This study traces curricular support for concepts related to infinity and division by zero, in both elementary and secondary mathematics curriculum documents in our province. It was motivated by results of our previous and ongoing work related to transition to post-secondary studies in mathematics, in which we identified consistent gaps and…

This article describes reflections of two mathematicians and a mathematics teacher educator who collaborated on the development and implementation of courses (probability and statistics connections, number concept connections, and middle school mathematics methods) for middle school mathematics preservice teachers. The instructors of the courses,…

Forming part of a wider research study, the current study investigated prospective middle school mathematics teachers' ways of covariational reasoning on tasks involving simultaneously changing quantities. As the introductory theme of a larger unit on derivative, a model development sequence on covariational reasoning was designed and experimented…

The present study aimed to examine lower secondary students? images of mathematics comprised of stated attitudes to and perceived needs for mathematics, and their views about mathematicians and their work. A group of 1284 lower secondary students drew a picture of mathematicians and described their drawings. The students? drawings fell into two…

The paper describes one problem solving strategy -- the Use of false assumption. The objective of the paper is to show, in accordance with Phylogenesis and Ontogenesis Theory, that it is worthwhile to reiterate the process of development of the concept of a variable and thus provide to pupils one of the ways helping them to eliminate usual…

Performance in Mathematics among pupils in lower primary schools in Kenya is a problem that continues to be a concern to parents, teachers and stakeholders in education. Teacher related factors and in particular teacher preparedness has been cited as a major contributing factor to poor teaching methods which fundamentally translates to pupils'…

This study explores components of ambitious teaching practices for teaching multiplicative properties that can give teachers opportunities to learn through a quick images activity in a cycle of enactment and investigation. Throughout the cycle, it is found that the participants have opportunities to learn the following components of ambitious…

Despite repeated discussions and practice, algebra students continue to make variable errors, in many ways, year after year. This same problem appeared thirty years ago in a list of common errors that math teachers today would immediately recognize, many involving exponents and distribution (Marquis 1988). Similar complaints even appeared in the…

An exploratory study was conducted to investigate the use of magic activities in a math course for prospective middle-school math teachers. This research report focuses on a lesson using two versions of math magic: (1) the "5-4-3-2-1-½ Magic" involves having students choose a secret number and apply six arithmetic operations in sequence…