This paper aims to understand how primary students use gestures to solve partition tasks and to what extent these gestures may promote fraction understanding. Analysis of six selected students' answers to partitioning tasks, classroom observation, and post-lesson interviews indicates that co-thought representational gestures play a critical role.…

The role of scientific reasoning in promoting scientific literacy during the early years of schooling is well acknowledged. Using the analytical framework for scientific reasoning skills by A. Opitz et al. (2017, "Educational Research and Evaluation," 23(3-4), 78-101), this multi-age observational study investigated the extent of…

Examples play a variety of roles in proving and disproving. Buchbinder and Zaslavsky (2019) have produced an a priori mathematical framework for assessing students' understanding of the role of examples when proving and disproving universal and existential statements. In this paper, I highlight three important aspects that suggest an extension of…

Although educational robotics competitions have become a popular research field in STEAM education, there is a lack of studies concerning the design process that student teams follow to build their solutions. This study aims to propose and evaluate We!Design!ForSTEAM, an approach for supporting design thinking in the context of STEAM and robotics…

Background: The sophistication of young children's arithmetic problem-solving strategies can be influenced through experience and instructional intervention. One potential pathway is through encountering story problems where the location of the unknown quantity varies. Aims: The goal of the present study is to characterize how arithmetic…

Effective mathematics teaching practices include not only probing student thinking and selecting student strategies to share but also facilitating discourse and encouraging reflection about important mathematical ideas (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2014, pp. 36-37). Encouraging students to use precise academic vocabulary to…

This study explores gender-based differences in sixth-grade students' potential for mathematical creativity through the interrelated processes of problem solving (PS) and problem posing (PP), grounded in a multidimensional framework of creativity--encompassing fluency, flexibility, and originality. A total of 346 sixth graders from public schools…

Background/purpose. Self-efficacy plays a crucial role in enhancing performance in complex tasks such as mathematical modeling, yet its impact remains underexplored. This study examines whether there are influences on students' self-efficacy in modeling. Materials/methods. The research method employs a quantitative design, utilizing regression…

This study aimed to examine the application of a realist hands-on learning approach and its contributions to optimizing the solid geometry conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills of students. It employed a non-equivalent pre-/post-test quasi-experimental research design. The results showed that there was a statistically significant…

This article features a fifth grade mathematics exploration planned to facilitate students' productive struggle. The exploration was a catalyst for a team of educators to unpack the teacher's experience when facilitating students' productive struggle. The team called this "teacher productive struggle" and shares about the construct…

The aims of this study were to synthesize and evaluate the learning model in gamification environment together with cartoon animation media to promote students' creative problem-solving skills. This study was divided into three phases, (i) synthesized and evaluated the appropriateness of learning model (ii) developed cartoon animation and (iii)…

Solving word problems is challenging for many children, but particularly for those with language difficulties. The objective was to examine the nature of the challenges experienced by children with language difficulties as they solved word problems in the context of a developmental-trajectory instructional sequence. We recruited 45 third graders…

In this cross-national study, we explore the different ways of reasoning-and-proving (RP) presented in three 8th grade textbooks, one from each country: Turkey, Norway, and Slovakia. While the analysis revealed that all three textbooks contain similar numbers of problems involving some form of RP, differences exist in terms of the dominating ways…

Over the past few years, the author and her colleagues have been engaged in a teaching and research project that explores what it means to "connect math to the real world" and how to effectively design and implement mathematics lessons that integrate real-world, sociopolitical issues with mathematics in elementary classrooms.…

Within elementary science reform, time is a crucial consideration, yet conceptions of time in education research are undertheorized. To address this gap, we use sociological literature to identify three conceptions of time that help us understand and interpret leaders' and teachers' sensemaking and decision making about time in their efforts to…