Research in mathematics education can be understood as a system of activities addressing the basic and applied problems related to teaching and learning of mathematics. Such a system includes the activities of foundation, planning, implementation, evaluation of mathematics instruction, and teacher professional development, which are supported by…

Teaching that attends to and builds on students' resources and treats students as capable mathematical sense makers has been referred to as responsive teaching. A body of research reports teachers' tendency to overlook students' mathematical thinking when their answer is correct and to correct it procedurally when students make a mistake. This…

As a person obsessed, perhaps overly so, with preventing water damage, an ailing dishwasher led to a system whereby who did the dishes in our household became a matter of chance. What happened next, however, was besmirchment of my character from hockey teammates, close friends, and especially from a room full of future elementary school…

In this dissertation, I utilize the post-structural philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari as a lens for investigating the proof process. Deleuze and Guattari were both post- structural philosophers who, like many in this tradition, troubled traditional notions related to stable identities, meaning, language, and mathematics. For…

The purpose of these meta-analyses was to examine the effectiveness of home-based interventions aimed at improving literacy and mathematics outcomes for preschool-age children (mean age = 4.29 years; range = 3.07-5.32 years) and to develop an understanding of what home-based interventions work in different contexts. A total of 32 studies met the…

Sixty (35 girls and 25 boys) 9th-grade students' conceptual understanding of the number line was qualitatively assessed through verbal explanations and visual representations. The assessment included an open-ended question focused on students' number line descriptions and the explanations coalesced around six features: sequential ordering (i.e.,…

Following psychologist Langer's theory, this study aimed to examine the influence of conditional tasks containing inherent uncertainty on the cultivation of mindfulness. It used preceding research to develop conditional mathematics tasks corresponding to integers and rational numbers, within a 10-lesson curriculum. It divided a total of 182 middle…

Although complex analysis is part of the study programs of many mathematics undergraduates, little research has been done on how individuals interpret basic concepts from complex analysis. To address this gap, this paper investigates how experts individually think about complex path integrals. For this purpose, the commognitive framework is used…

Recent research in university mathematics education has moved beyond the traditional focus on the transition from secondary to tertiary education and students' understanding of introductory courses such as pre-calculus and calculus. There is growing interest in the challenges students face as they move into more advanced mathematics courses that…

Understanding fractions, especially their magnitude, is essential for success in mathematics. Unfortunately, fractions are one of the most challenging mathematics concepts to teach and learn. Several studies have examined preservice teacher (PST) knowledge of fractions, but very few studies have looked for ways to improve this knowledge. This…

We propose the 'flow of a proof' as a construct that relates to the balance lecturers achieve in their presentation between the proof as a whole and its different parts, taking into account various aspects (informal, contextual) of proof classroom presentation. We conducted expert interviews in which we presented two different proofs of the same…

This paper is written as a guide for any instructor seeking to develop the mathematical modeling process or open-ended problem solving in their courses. We describe a pedagogical approach to create mini modeling problems to develop the modeling process. These are problems that fall between traditional homework problems and open-ended modeling…

Mathematics traditionally has been taught in a way that reifies the cultural belief that it is discrete in nature and, therefore, irrelevant to other content areas and the real world. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, inclusive of mathematics teacher educators, views this belief as unproductive to learning and has stressed the need for…

Several studies indicate that exploring mathematical ideas by using more than one approach to prove the same statement is an important matter in mathematics education. In this work, we have collected a few different methods of proving the multinomial theorem. The goal is to help further the understanding of this theorem for those who may not be…

It has been over thirty years since the nuclear reactor meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but why there is still an officially designated exclusion zone? The Chernobyl Disaster Task combines the learning of exponential functions with properties of radioactive substances to help students understand the ongoing effects of the meltdown.…