Too often, students are merely consumers of mathematics, without many opportunities to engage in authentic processes of doing mathematics. As a mathematics teacher educator, I decided to provide more opportunities for my prospective teachers (PSTs) to do so. In my mathematics class for elementary education majors, the PSTs worked on two…

Children's early math skills have been hailed as a powerful predictor of academic success. Disparities in socioeconomic context, however, also have dramatic consequences on children's learning. It is therefore critical to investigate both of these distinct contributors in order to better understand the early foundations of children's academic…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of GeoGebra software on pre-service teachers' mathematical connection skills. The participants of the study comprised 22 pre-service mathematics teachers. A mathematical connection self-efficacy scale and an open-ended questionnaire regarding mathematical connection skills were used as data…

Background: Students commonly struggle with mathematics and mathematical problem-solving. Therefore, it is necessary to design and implement interventions aimed at improving these essential components of learning. Furthermore, the outcomes of these interventions can vary significantly and appear to be a function of a student's initial competencies…

The introduction of the school subject Mathematical Literacy (ML) was to develop numerate and well informed citizens in South Africa. However the success of the subject is dependent on the ways in which teachers mediate the subject with their learners. The purpose of the study reported on in this article was to explore the extent to which the…

Exploiting the special synergy between science and mathematics can deepen children's understanding of scientific concepts and ideas and provide a range of contextualised opportunities for children to apply their mathematical knowledge and skills. With some creative thought and careful planning, science activities can be developed so that they…

Research has demonstrated strong relations between spatial skill and mathematics across ages and in both typical and atypical populations, suggesting that a significant proportion of variance in mathematics performance can be explained by variance in spatial skill. Why do these relations exist and how do they develop? Studies of dimensionality in…

Quantitative learning centers (QLCs) have emerged on undergraduate around the globe in an attempt to provide necessary support to students enrolled in undergraduate courses that address quantitative literacy. QLCs often provide support through peer tutoring to students in mathematics or related courses. Since QLCs are prevalent on undergraduate…

This study explores six item-reduction methodologies used to shorten an existing complex problem-solving non-objective test by evaluating how each shortened form performs across three sources of validity evidence (i.e., test content, internal structure, and relationships with other variables). Two concerns prompted the development of the present…

Previous research suggests that as societies empower women educationally, gender differences in numeracy skills will decline. Using direct measures of 56,142 adults' numeracy skills from the Programme for International Assessment for Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this article studies whether this claim is evidenced across 20 Organisation for…

The Price is Right Bidder's Row and games provide many opportunities for mathematical connections. The Price is Right website has videos or pictures for students to see how each game is played (http://www.priceisright.com/games/). This article will describe the mathematics of probability and statistics that is integrated in the famous television…

Take a moment to think about the students class. What are their mathematical strengths? How can a teacher know a mathematical strength when they see it? Can teachers identify at least one mathematical strength for every student? More important, how are teachers using students' strengths in their mathematics classrooms? Teaching is a complex…

In this paper we report on a survey designed to test whether or not students differentiated between two different types of problems involving combinations--problems in which combinations are used to count unordered sets of distinct objects (a natural, common way to use combinations), and problems in which combinations are used to count ordered…

Several major organizations have recommended revisions to mathematics requirements for biology majors. To determine whether these changes would benefit future biologists, we investigated mathematics use in research biology. We surveyed prominent journals in high and low math-use areas for articles referencing the use of quantitative methods. In…

Data on content knowledge and self-efficacy beliefs were collected from 41 elementary preservice teachers enrolled in a mathematics methods course. Correlational analysis was used to determine whether a relationship existed between elementary preservice teachers' mathematics content knowledge (MCK) and two factors representing mathematics teacher…