This article describes part of a study which investigated the role of questions in students' approaches to learning mathematics at the secondary-tertiary interface, focussing on the enculturation of students at the University of Oxford. Use of the Mathematical Assessment Task Hierarchy taxonomy revealed A-level Mathematics and Further Mathematics…

Since 1999 South African learners have participated in various international studies but sadly the learners have continued to perform dismally, which brings to question the quality of their education. Meanwhile, Singaporean students have been among the top achievers in all these competitions. Many comparative studies have been done between…

Homework has been associated with a range of academic and cognitive benefits for secondary students. Research has also revealed that students' homework behaviours can vary with demographic traits. An important factor that may account for some of this variation is the role played by teachers and schools in homework allocation. It is hypothesised…

Based on Foucault's concept of the dispositive, the paper attempts to show how societies and schools have been functioning for some time now by regulating three dispositives: juridical, disciplinary, and security. While the crises of the 1970s shifted the combination of dispositives in education in the West towards security, this shift in the…

This Study Snapshot highlights key findings from a study that examines full-day kindergarten (FDK) implementation in Oregon. The evidence base on FDK is generally positive for short-term effects and unclear for longer-term effects, with some prior research associating FDK with gains in student outcomes such as grade 3 math and reading standardized…

Conditional independence (CI) between response time and response accuracy is a fundamental assumption of many joint models for time and accuracy used in educational measurement. In this study, posterior predictive checks (PPCs) are proposed for testing this assumption. These PPCs are based on three discrepancy measures reflecting different…

To understand relationships between students' quantitative reasoning with fractions and their algebraic reasoning, a clinical interview study was conducted with 18 middle and high school students. The study included six students with each of three different multiplicative concepts, which are based on how students create and coordinate composite…

From a discursive perspective, differences in the language in which mathematics questions are posed change the nature of the mathematics with which students are expected to engage. The project The Evolution of the Discourse of School Mathematics (EDSM) analysed the discourse of mathematics examination papers set in the UK between 1980 and 2011. In…

To an unreconstructed cognitivist with experience of developing General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations and national tests in mathematics, the three papers which provide the core of this special issue (Morgan & Sfard; Morgan, Morgan & Tang) provided a refreshing opportunity to consider examination items from a…

The information provided in this report shows how students perform when they repeat algebra I and how the level of improvement varies depending on initial course performance and the academic measure (course grades or CST scores). This information can help inform decisions and policies regarding whether and under what circumstances students should…

The purpose of this study was to apply a random item mixture nominal item response model (RIM-MixNRM) for investigating instruction effects. The host study design was a pre-test-and-post-test, school-based cluster randomized trial. A RIM-MixNRM was used to identify students' error patterns in mathematics at the pre-test and the post-test.…

This study investigated students' procedural and conceptual knowledge of the definite integral. Twenty-five students enrolled in one section of an undergraduate Calculus II class participated in this study. Data were collected from a test that was conducted during the fourth week of the semester. The test aimed at collecting information about the…

Bloom's taxonomy is proposed as a tool by which to assess the level of complexity of assessment tasks in statistics. Guidelines are provided for how to locate tasks at each level of the taxonomy, along with descriptions and examples of suggested test questions. Through the "Blooming" of an examination--that is, locating its constituent…

This contribution focuses on a scheme developed to characterize the level of difficulty of an examination in the course "Linear Algebra for Engineers" and on the transfer of the underlying idea to a similar scheme for examinations in the course "Analysis I for Engineers". Using these schemes, it is possible to define standards…

Many researchers argue that a deep understanding of fractions is important for a successful transition to algebra. Teaching, especially in the middle years, needs to focus specifically on those areas of fraction knowledge and operations that support subsequent solution processes for algebraic equations. This paper focuses on the results of Year 6…