It is important to work on verbal mathematical problem-solving skills, which is one of the high-level skills with which students have difficulty. Supporting problems with visuals has been suggested by mathematics educators to develop this skill. This study examined the effect of the visualization of mathematical problems on the problem-solving…

The transition from kindergarten to the first grade of elementary school is a crucial developmental period that can significantly influence pupils' academic trajectories. This study aimed to examine whether adaptation to the school environment moderates the relationship between skill-specific performance and academic achievement in two core…

The hundreds chart is a valuable tool for teachers in elementary mathematics classrooms. The present study investigated the effects of spatial configurations of virtual hundreds charts on children's knowledge of base-ten concepts. Kindergarten and first-grade students were assigned to three instructional conditions in which they worked with a…

In this article, we present research on eight kindergarten and eight first-grade students' understandings of the arithmetic properties of commutativity, additive identity, and additive inverse during a classroom teaching experiment, selected from a larger study that included 88 students. In this study, we explore the students' types of…

Changes in U.S. textbooks indicate that U.S. first-grade students in the Common Core era were exposed to a wider variety of word problem types than students in previous generations were. We compared the performance of U.S. first graders in the Common Core era with that of previous generations in solving 11 types of additive word problems to…

This cohort-sequential study explored the working memory (WM) structures that underlie growth in mathematical word problem solving (WPS) performance in elementary school emergent bilingual children whose first language (L1) is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 429) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in southwest U.S. school districts at Wave 1 were…

Informal strategies reflecting the representation of a situation described in an arithmetic word problem mediate students' solving processes. When the informal strategies are inefficient, teaching students to make way for more efficient ways to find the solution is an important educational issue in mathematics. The current paper presents a…

The focus of this article is the role of language comprehension within word-problem solving (WPS). The role of the language comprehension in WPS is explained, and an overview of research illustrating language comprehension's contribution to WPS is described. Next, an innovative intervention that embeds word problem (WP)-specific language…

Word problems form an important part of the early grade mathematics curriculum in South Africa. Studies have shown that the relative difficulty of word problems differ: learners are more likely to solve certain types of word problems than others, with compare type problems being the most difficult. In order to help early grade learners understand…

The main purpose of this study was to test the effects of word-problem (WP) intervention, with versus without embedded language comprehension (LC) instruction, on at-risk 1st graders' WP performance. We also isolated the need for a structured approach to WP intervention and tested the efficacy of schema-based instruction at 1st grade. Children (n…

Ensuring students correctly understand the notion of equality is a fundamental problem in teaching mathematics. Is it possible to teach arithmetic in such a way that students do not misinterpret the equal sign "=" as indicating the result of an arithmetic operation and, consequently, viewing the arithmetic operation symbols (+, -, or x)…

The purpose of this study was to explore interactions between limited English proficiency (LEP) status, as a function of risk status (low math performance at the start of the school year), on computation and word-problem-solving performance. Among 260 first-grade students, classified as at-risk (AR) or not-at-risk (NAR) for math disability, we…

Scholars have long argued that individuals' beliefs influence their behaviors and the decisions they make throughout their lives. Focusing on beliefs as a cognitive construct, the purpose of this study was to identify several key beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning held by practicing elementary mathematics teachers. An iterative…

Scholars have long argued that individuals' beliefs influence their behaviors and the decisions they make throughout their lives. Focusing on beliefs as a cognitive construct, the purpose of this study was to identify several key beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning held by practicing elementary mathematics teachers. An iterative…

Arithmetic word-problem solving is an important component of elementary mathematics curricula that links school mathematics to real-life problem solving. The present 3-year longitudinal study examined children's arithmetic word-problem solving through understanding its 2 component processes: number-sentence construction and computation. Chinese…