This article describes an activity that, on the surface, engages the students in basic skill review. Its ultimate goal is to cause students to make conjectures, seek to justify those conjectures, and to think mathematically. (Contains 3 figures.)

The development of conceptual understanding in arithmetic is a gradual process and children may make use of a concept in some situations before others. Previous research has demonstrated that when children are given arithmetic problems with an inverse relationship they can infer that the initial and final quantities are the same. However, we do…

Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) has been shown to enhance rote memory skills and improve higher order critical thinking skills. The challenge now is to identify what aspects of CAI improve which specific higher-order skills. This study focuses on the effectiveness of using CAI to teach logarithmic graphing and dimensional analysis. Two groups…

In this article, the author describes a way of motivating learners to solve and reflect upon mathematical problems. The author wanted to find ways to help the Y6 class with their KS2 SATs, but more importantly she wanted to develop their interest and skills in solving mathematical challenges. She spent some time working on the idea of a "…

This study was conducted to reveal how students at university level justify their solutions to tasks with various degrees of difficulty. The study is part of a larger study of students' concept formation of limits. The mathematical area is limits of functions. The study was carried out at a Swedish university at the first level of mathematics. The…

This study examines basic number processing (subitizing, automaticity, and magnitude representation) as the possible underpinning of mathematical difficulties often evidenced in deaf adults. Hearing and deaf participants completed tasks to assess the automaticity with which magnitude information was activated and retrieved from long-term memory…

The purpose of this critical analysis was to investigate the young children's sense of numerical magnitudes and the important attributes of classrooms where children in kindergarten and first grade are exposed to mathematics. This study aimed to offer guidelines that will assist teachers as they teach mathematics to children between the ages of…

A curriculum-based instructional management system was used to enhance the mathematics instruction of 3rd through 6th grade Title I and non-Title I students. Improvements in math achievement for Title I students who were and were not participants in this curriculum enhancement were also compared. Title I students who participated in the…

The present study investigated 90 elementary teachers' ability to identify two systematic error patterns in subtraction and then prescribe an instructional focus. Presented with two sets of 20 completed subtraction problems comprised of basic facts, computation, and word problems representative of two students' math performance, participants were…

This article describes a unique supplementary program that teaches early childhood mathematics (Pre-K to Grade 2), through a series of six problem-solving adventure stories. The mathematics concepts are taught to the children through the medium of oral storytelling sagas in an integrated approach that addresses language arts as well as early…

Peer-to-peer assessment, take-home exams and a mathematical modeling survey were used to monitor and assess students' attitudes, skills and competencies in mathematical modeling. The students were all in a secondary mathematics, teacher education program with a comprehensive amount of mathematics studies behind them. Findings indicate that…

Mathematics lecturers have long expressed concern about their students poor mathematical background and the effect this has on performance in first mathematics courses at university level. This article explores a similar concern about students' numeracy in a statistics course for psychologists.

Attendance in U.S. preschools has risen substantially in recent decades, but gaps in enrollment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families remain. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, we analyze the effect of participation in child care and early education on children's school…

Mathematical problem solving is a transfer challenge requiring children to develop schemas for recognizing novel problems as belonging to familiar problem types for which they know solutions. Schema-based transfer instruction (SBTI) explicitly teaches transfer features that change problems in superficial ways to make them appear novel even though…

Given issues related to differences in learner characteristics, effective sampling across the content domain, and recent emphases on assessing meaningfully contextualised abilities and higher-order cognitive processes, the "traditional" mathematics test arguably does not provide a valid measure of student ability. Consequently, there is…