Teaching requires attention to individual student needs by providing both adequate challenge and sufficient support to help students successfully gain academic skills (Shurr et al., 2019). The learning stages framework divides typical learning into four distinct stages: acquisition, fluency, maintenance, and generalization (Collins, 2012; Haring…

Fractions are a very important but difficult topic in elementary and secondary mathematics curricula around the world. The difficulty in teaching and learning fractions is usually caused by their various subconstructs. To facilitate learning of fractions, a test consisting of 20 items was developed to examine 310 sixth graders' hierarchical…

Although raised in the early days of research on teacher noticing, the question of context specificity has remained largely unanswered to this day. In this study, we build on our prior research on a specific aspect of noticing, namely teachers' analysis of how representations are dealt with in mathematics classroom situations. For the purpose of…

The purpose of this dissertation is to study preservice elementary teachers' (PSTs') procedural and conceptual understanding of fraction multiplication, and to study how math drawings might be used to reveal this knowledge and encourage learning. This dissertation is in response to the call for more rigorous qualitative studies that look at PSTs'…

The present study examined preservice elementary teachers' performance on the problems of multiplication and division of fractions and compared their performances and analyzed the misconceptions. An instrument including 11 fraction multiplication and division tasks was given and the task involved three contexts: making own story problem,…

The present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of the concrete-representational-abstract instruction strategies employed in the direct instruction of fractions to students with learning disabilities. Furthermore, the generalization of the instruction to different settings and tools, the follow-up data for one and three weeks after the…

In mathematics, learners often spontaneously draw on prior knowledge when learning new ideas. In this study, we examined whether the specific diagrams used to represent more familiar (i.e., whole number division) and less familiar ideas (i.e., fraction division) shape successful transfer. Undergraduates (N = 177) were randomly assigned to…

The aim of the study reported on here was to assess the impact of differentiated instruction in terms of mathematics achievement and the attitudes of secondary school learners to reveal their views on differentiated instruction. The study was designed according to a mixed method design in which both quantitative and qualitative methods were used.…

Background: Digital game-based learning is gaining increased attention from both researchers and educators for improving mathematics instruction. However, the evidence for game-based learning is mixed and research with rigorous research design and analyses are limited. Objective: Here, in a pre-registered randomized controlled study, we…

Young children have informal knowledge of fractions before learning about fraction symbols in school. In the current study, we followed 103 children in the Mid-Atlantic United States from the fall to the spring of first grade to characterize the development of individual differences in early informal fraction knowledge, as well as its relation to…

Fractions remain a challenging area of school mathematics at every stage of education, with impacts that extend far beyond the school years. For this study, researchers engaged in classroom-based design research over a 6-year period to investigate effective strategies for teaching fractions with Canadian students. Participants included 86 teachers…

The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine the differences between high- and low-performing students' development of fraction proficiency over a school year and to investigate how those differences were related to instruction in fractions versus instruction in other mathematics topics. The data for this study were drawn from a group of (n =…

Knowing how best to respond to students' mathematical inquiries is an important skill for all teachers to develop. A class of pre-service teachers (PSTs) was presented with a scripting task in which a student conjectured that 1/6.5 was "exactly in between" fractions 1/6 and 1/7. However, instead of addressing the student's inquiry…

PS-I learning approaches with an initial problem-solving phase (PS) followed by an instruction phase (I) can be optimised by providing adaptive (individualised) instruction that builds on students' problem-solving products. A computer-based implementation of both phases offers the possibility of adaptivity at the transition from the…

This research examines the effects of worked-out examples, grounded in Cognitive Load Theory, which incorporate different solution methods through the Nearpod application--a Web 2.0 tool--on fifth-grade students' achievement in fractions, as well as their attitudes and motivation towards mathematics. The study group consisted of 77 fifth-grade…