Presents students' successful writing assessments which alleviate students' fears by assigning interesting trigonometry problems and places students in a setting in which they use critical thinking skills, express their ideas verbally with other students, express their mathematics in writing, and have fun. (ASK)

Describes a scheme for testing and assisting students with the mathematical skills essential for math courses. Discusses the aims and philosophy of the scheme and describes the logistics of running such a scheme. Reviews student performance and discusses those skills that students are strong in or have difficulty mastering. (Author/ASK)

Evaluated an instructional procedure that focused on reflective problem-solving and used young children's fascination with stars as a starting point to develop their concept of numbers. Found that test group performance on mathematics problem- solving tasks indicated developing understanding of the concept of numbers 1 through 5, compared to that…

Lists six basic principles for building numeracy. Presents variety of activities in four categories of number concepts: spatial relationship, classifying, patterns, and correspondence. Suggests music, movement, and book ideas for each category of activity. Gives directions for making a geoboard and a reusable graph board. (DLH)

Describes ways of thinking about probability and some common student misconceptions. Suggests ways of addressing students' misconceptions and illustrates these ideas with an example. (ASK)

A two-year study conducted in two fourth grade classrooms investigated the effectiveness of two mathematics curricula. Results found that a direct instruction program, "Connecting Math Concepts," resulted in significantly higher student scores on mathematics tests than the use of a traditional math basal textbook. (Contains references.) (CR)

Presents a first-semester course in mathematics for 6-year-old children by formulating certain general requirements for the curriculum and the instructional methods with the aim of leading children to form their initial mathematical concepts. (ASK)

Describes how different operations on matrices can be modeled with simple spreadsheets. Presents three activities on this topic. (ASK)

The approximation of functions such as the sine, cosine, and exponential by polynomials is significant and interesting enough for students to learn about. Presents Maclaurin's theorem, examples employing the theorem, and applications of the theorem. (ASK)

Describes a mathematics reasoning course at Drake University and efforts to introduce collaborative, small-group, mixed-ability activities into the classroom. Comments on the ease, difficulties, rewards, and demands involved. Discusses student and instructor attitudes towards the collaborative activities. (AIM)

Investigated the enhancement of generic skills in academic numeracy within an Australian teacher education program, particularly: what constitutes academic numeracy, design and implementation of appropriate numeracy strategies, and how best to integrate tertiary literacy and numeracy in university courses. Resulted in a framework for academic…

Examined whether 5- and 6-year-olds understand that addition and subtraction cancel each other and whether this understanding is based on identity or quantity of addend and subtrahend. Found that children used inversion principle. Six- to eight-year-olds also used inversion and decomposition to solve a + b - (B+1) problems. Concluded that…

This article describes students using the context of a walk-a-thon for learning about linear and nonlinear functions. (Contains 6 figures.)

This article describes how students investigated numerical data resulting from an engineering experiment as a way to develop understanding of reciprocal functions. (Contains 7 figures.)

Niels Bohr's term "complementarity" has been used by several authors to capture the essential aspects of the cognitive and epistemological development of scientific and mathematical concepts. In this paper we will conceive of complementarity in terms of the dual notions of extension and intension of mathematical terms. A complementarist approach…