An extensive body of empirical evidence shows that math skills at school entry are the strongest predictor of later academic success and educational attainment, but many children lack the opportunity to build the math skills needed for future success. Children who begin school with relatively low levels of math knowledge are at risk of falling…

The University of Wollongong's first locally developed and hosted Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) "The Reluctant Mathematician" was run in the last four weeks of our summer holiday, prior to Autumn session in 2014. It was developed to lift maths skills at our university and also in the community--where maths skills continue to be a…

The goal of this article is to introduce the topic of "learning to reason from samples," which is the focus of this special issue of "Educational Studies in Mathematics" on "statistical reasoning." Samples are data sets, taken from some wider universe (e.g., a population or a process) using a particular procedure…

This study explores two number composition and decomposition activities from a numeracy perspective. Both activities have the same mathematical structure but each employs different tools and contexts. Twenty kindergarten children engaged individually with these activities. Verbal utterances as well as actions of the child and interviewer were…

Teachers often promote care in doing calculations, but for most students a single mistake rarely has major consequences. This article presents several real-life events in which relatively minor mathematical errors led to situations that ranged from public embarrassment to the loss of millions of dollars' worth of equipment. The stories here…

This meta-analysis is the first to provide a quantitative synthesis of empirical evaluations of mathematical intervention programs implemented in secondary schools for students with learning disabilities and mathematics difficulties. Included studies used a treatment-control group design. A total of 19 experimental and quasi-experimental studies…

Mathematical games are widely used in the primary classroom; however, not all games are equally valuable. How might teachers decide which specific games to introduce? The authors present five principles of educationally-rich games to help teachers address this issue. In so doing, they provide teachers with a usable framework to stimulate…

The article contains the results of the study conducted in order to discover the most effective ways of developing students' programming abilities with the means of non-programming disciplines and activities. The authors observe the learning practices and habits employed by students with highly developed programming abilities and compare these…

This paper reports on the first part of a multiphase research project that seeks to identify and address the difficulties encountered by physics students when studying differential equations. Differential equations are used extensively by undergraduate physics students, particularly in the advanced modules of their degree. It is, therefore,…

The purpose of this research was to determine strategies used by 8th grade students in Number Sense problems. This was a case study of 28 8th grade students at three similar secondary schools in a city centre south of Turkey. A Number Sense test consisting of 25 items designed according to five main Number Sense components was used as a data…

This longitudinal study examined the influence of prekindergarten teacher characteristics and classroom instructional processes during mathematical activities on the growth of mathematics learning scores in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. Participants attended state-funded and Head Start prekindergarten programs. Mathematical…

The present work studies the influence of leisure activities on the creative intelligence of the students. An experimental pre- and post-test design was carried out with individuals selected in a sampling process. The design identifies the ease of students to place themselves in possible contexts and solve them mathematically through Polya's…

We explore the transition from school to university through a commognitive (Sfard 2008) analysis of twenty-two students' examination scripts from the end of year examination of a first year, year-long module on Sets, Numbers, Proofs and Probability in a UK mathematics department. Our analysis of the scripts relies on a preliminary analysis of the…

Originally written 30 years ago, this paper is an analysis of the central challenge of schooling--that of engaging fully the powers of students' minds in classroom learning. This challenge maintains its relevance today. The work of engaging what John Dewey referred to as students' "inner attention" becomes the focus of an investigation…

Research Findings: The present study examines connections among participation in open- and closed-skilled sports; the metabolic intensity of each sport; and executive function (EF), literacy, and math achievement in a sample of 3rd-grade children. Utilizing data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child…