Despite plenty of practice, many students find interpreting and solving word-problems difficult. How can teachers work with students so that they learn to make appropriate sense (or should it be "inappropriate sense"?) of word-problems? One way to investigate how students make sense of word-problems is to ask them to write some of their own. The…

High school algebra and geometry teachers use graphing calculators extensively in their classes today. National and state mathematics curriculum standards recommend their use for class work, tests and assignments. Because of recent legislation, including "IDEA 2004" and "No Child Left Behind", most students with mild…

Having students design and construct solar cookers is a great way to teach them about designing to meet human needs and about many basic global issues related to health and the environment. Because the activity includes solid content from the fields of math, science and technology, it is an excellent vehicle for technology educators who want to…

A sequence of number pairs can be used to generate many interesting examples in teaching mathematics subjects at various levels. It is often used in elementary or middle school mathematics classes to illustrate the concept of "patterns." In this paper the authors present a few interesting ways of using this sequence to form examples for high…

It is often claimed that computers have the potential to engage and motivate children in ways that conventional classroom teaching does not. Children are assumed to have a natural aptitude and enthusiasm for computers; and the Internet is seen to make learning automatically more interesting and exciting. Over the last few years educational…

Facilitating mental computation discussion comes with its own set of challenges for researchers and teachers. It is important to be able to help capture the students' ideas, before they disappear and seem like little more than moments of magic! In enabling children to learn how numbers work, the current emphasis on mental computation is driven by…

Over the past three years, Richardson Primary School has transformed its entire educational program based around the widespread introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) into the school. A review of this initiative states that "Richardson is the first school in the ACT, and probably Australia, where the total school community, the…

Teachers often encounter difficulty in teaching estimation of measurement to young children. The intention when teaching the typical "jelly bean jar" classroom activity is to help children develop estimation skills, but most children cannot conceptualise the difference between guessing and estimating. The fact is that many students view…

No Child Left Behind mandates accountability data for school districts. This mandate has led to increased attention to instruction and academic remediation among educational researchers. The current study used schoolwide curriculum-based assessment (CBA) and curriculum-based measurement (CBM) data to plan and deliver mathematics instruction to…

In this article, the authors would like to look at a range of solutions submitted by Year 4-5 teams in the 2003 "Naturally Mathematical Challenge" to a question that involves no more than the numbers 1 to 6 and possible arrangements of them. In the context of other competition questions and in their elaboration of mathematical process,…

This research focuses on eliciting bilingual students' problem-solving reasoning by providing mathematical tasks designed to involve the students in the action described in the problem by making connections to contexts familiar to them. Results showed these tasks allowed children to articulate their mathematical reasoning through gestures and…

This article presents a constructivist approach for teaching mathematics to prospective elementary school teachers in USA. This approach employs a model of a "mathematical situation," a set of physical operations and a physical language to reason about students' mathematical doings. One of the primary goals of this approach is to promote a…

This paper focuses on high school mathematics teachers and what they do when they use digital technology in their lessons. It is essentially a discursive paper but it uses data from a project on teachers using technology to illustrate points. The main aim of the paper is to present an holistic account of factors influencing teachers' practice. A…

Quilts are an integral part of the North American culture. Most households in North America have quilts with intricate geometric patterns. These patterns symbolize different things to different groups of people in this part of the world. It is important for students to see how mathematics comes from what is done in day-to-day life, not from the…

Desiring to better encourage students' thinking and conceptual development, a fourth-grade teacher examines classroom discourse and written work during her students' analysis and description of basic geometric shapes.