In this brief article, the author illustrates the flaws of FOIL (multiply the First, Outer, Inner, and Last terms of two binomials) and introduces the box method. Much like FOIL, the box method can become easy to use. Unlike FOIL, however, the box method is a more direct and visible link to using the distributive property to determine area, a…

Research on students' attitudes toward statistics has attracted many statistics instructors and statistics education researchers. In this study, we use confirmatory factor analysis to analyze data collected from an introductory statistics course using the Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics. The results suggest that the items and six factors are…

The aim of this study is to investigate the anxiety levels of high school students towards mathematics lesson according to gender variable. A total of 89 ninth grade students (29 females and 60 males) from various high schools were enrolled in Van province center in the 2017-2018 academic year. In the study, the data were collected by using the…

Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to replace commercial learning materials in education. An empirical examination of this potential was conducted, comparing the end-of-year mathematics test results of 12,110 elementary school students clustered within 95 schools from five school districts in the state of Washington in the United…

One of the research objectives was formulated to improve the quality of education, namely by understanding the problems of students and teachers. There were three main groups of quality characteristics of education highlighted in scientific and academic literature in Russia, namely the quality of educational objectives, the quality of the…

The study reported here investigates the role, experiences and aspirations of a community of mathematics postgraduates as they learn to tutor in a mathematics support centre in a research-intensive university. This is achieved through in-depth interviews with nine postgraduate tutors all of whom had experience working in the centre. The data is…

Simulation is an effective tool for analyzing probability models as well as for facilitating understanding of concepts in probability and statistics. Unfortunately, implementing a simulation from scratch often requires users to think about programming issues that are not relevant to the simulation itself. We have developed a Python package called…

This study examined third-grade students' reasoning and discussions on multiplication when they initially encounter it in the classroom. The aim of the study was to analyse the data from teaching and learning multiplication in 24 classrooms and, thus make a contribution to the research and conceptualisations about students' reasoning and strategy…

The study reported here addresses pre-service and in-service teachers' attitudes toward mathematical-geometrical definitions. The goal of the study is to investigate whether understanding the role of definitions as classification and identification criteria will guarantee that participants: (1) accept that there may be more than one equivalent…

The purpose of this action research project was to investigate the impact of a mastery-based grading system on the mindsets of high school students. The mixed methods data collection for this project took place over the course of two years. The students were part of a high achieving and mostly high socio-economic status community. I collected…

Children's understanding of fractions, including their symbols, concepts, and arithmetic procedures, is an important facet of both developmental research on mathematics cognition and mathematics education. Research on infants', children's, and adults' fraction and ratio reasoning allows us to test a range of proposals about the development of…

Using a multisite cluster-randomized controlled trial design, we evaluated the effect of the first year of a three-year teacher professional development called Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) on third -fifth grade students' mathematics achievement. Teachers in the intervention condition participated in nine days of professional development…

In this dissertation I seek to examine and expose the world of teaching, and particularly the world of teaching mathematics in public middle schools and high schools in New York City. These schools are administered by the New York City Department of Education which each year is responsible for the education of over one million students. In this…

This paper describes a task that was used, in a broader study on mathematical giftedness and mindsets, as part of a process to identify mathematical giftedness in primary school students (see Parish, 2019). A discussion of the task, together with an analysis of student responses, offers insights that could be used by classroom teachers for both…

In this position paper, we review the practice of differentiation -- a universal concept aimed to support diverse students in our classrooms. In exposing the wide-ranging practices of differentiated instruction, and critiques of current implementation, we argue that differentiation in the mathematics classroom needs to be reframed in terms of a…