This study examined the effects of the concrete-representational-abstract integrated sequence (CRA-I) on teaching place value concepts and their application. The research questions addressed the extent to which CRA-I changed student performance in (a) completing equations that required subtraction with regrouping in the tens place, (b) completing…

Mathematical word problem-solving skills are crucial for students across their lives, yet solving such tasks poses challenges for many. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of mathematical word problems that are associated with students' performance is important. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the…

By the end of primary school, children are expected to acquire a range of mathematical skills that progressively develop. This study aimed to gain insight into how a large number of numerical and geometrical measures are grouped and whether the structures shift or remain invariant along child's development based on the data obtained from a sample…

Competence with rational numbers is essential for mathematics proficiency in secondary mathematics. However, many students struggle with rational number concepts, and students with mathematics difficulties struggle even more. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an intervention that incorporated the use of explicit instruction…

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Prime Factors Chart (PFC) as an alternative teaching material, which was developed for teaching the concepts within the "factors and multiples" unit in the middle school mathematics curriculum. Twelve middle school mathematics teachers used the PFC to teach concepts, such as prime…

Students in developmental math classes have been documented to struggle with arithmetic. This dissertation research was a response to the calls in the literature to qualitatively understand what students are learning in a classroom. Number sequences have been well researched to document the connection of student understanding of math in elementary…

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

The purpose of this study was to understand children's operations on fragmenting schemes while they are engaged with three different visual models, including circle, rectangle, and length model. This study was a sequential explanatory mixed method, which included two phases that happened sequentially with the dominant use of the quantitative…

Psychological studies of early numerical development fill a void in mathematics education research. However, conflations between magnitude awareness and number, and over-attributions of researcher conceptions to children, have led to psychological models that are at odds with findings from mathematics educators on later numerical development. In…

We assessed a range of theoretically critical predictors (numerosity discrimination, number knowledge, counting, language, executive function and finger gnosis) of early arithmetic development in a large unselected sample of 569 children at school entry. Assessments were repeated 12 months later. Although all predictors (except finger gnosis) were…

First-grade mathematics curriculum has been typically constructed to emphasize the development of whole number and operations. Topics addressed to a lesser extent include algebraic thinking, measurement, and geometry. In this research study, we suggest an alternative to this balance of topics. We compared prior research and learning expectations…

The conceptual development of natural number in preschoolers is well-researched. However, less is known about the conceptual development of zero. Recent studies suggest that children develop an understanding of zero after learning to count. It remains unclear, when a conceptual understanding of "zero" as number word for an empty set…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are thought to have a more local than global perceptual style. We used a novel paradigm to investigate how grouping-induced response biases in numerosity judgments depend on autistic-like personality traits in neurotypical adults. Participants judged the numerosity of clouds of dot-pairs connected by thin…

Children display an early sensitivity to implicit proportions (e.g., 1 of 5 apples vs. 3 of 4 apples), but have considerable difficulty in learning the explicit, symbolic proportions denoted by fractions (e.g., "1/5" vs. "3/4"). Theoretically, reducing the gap between representations of implicit versus explicit proportions…

Over three decades ago, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 1991) proposed that "for students to develop the ability to formulate problems, to explore, conjecture, and reason logically, to evaluate whether something makes sense, classroom discourse must be founded on mathematical evidence" (p. 34). As math interventionists…