Interleaved practice combined with comparison prompts can better foster students' adaptive use of subtraction strategies compared to blocked practice. It has not been previously investigated whether all students benefit equally from these teaching approaches. While interleaving subtraction tasks prompts students' attention to the different task…

Although children learn more when teachers gesture, it is not clear "how" gesture supports learning. Here, we sought to investigate the nature of the memory processes that underlie the observed benefits of gesture on lasting learning. We hypothesized that instruction with gesture might create memory representations that are particularly…

Documenting how students with learning disabilities (LD) initially conceive of fractional quantities, and how their understandings may align with or differ from students with mathematics difficulties, is necessary to guide development of assessments and interventions that attach to unique ways of thinking or inherent difficulties these students…

An emerging consensus suggests that guided discovery, which combines discovery and instruction, is a more effective educational approach than either one in isolation. The goal of this study was to examine two specific forms of guided discovery, testing whether conceptual instruction should precede or follow exploratory problem solving. In both…

Current assessment practices in the United States are not able to accurately capture the total linguistic, cognitive, and achievement abilities of bilingual learners. There are psychometric complexities involved when assessing and interpreting test results of bilingual students, which impact the validity of this practice. Further, the compromise…

Providing exploratory activities prior to explicit instruction can facilitate learning. However, the level of guidance provided during the exploration has largely gone unstudied. In this study, we examined the effects of 1 form of guidance, feedback, during exploratory mathematics problem solving for children with varying levels of prior domain…

People remember information better if they generate the information while studying rather than read the information. However, prior research has not investigated whether this generation effect extends to related but unstudied items and has not been conducted in classroom settings. We compared third graders' success on studied and unstudied…

Do typical arithmetic problems hinder learning of mathematical equivalence? Second and third graders (7-9 years old; N= 80) received lessons on mathematical equivalence either with or without typical arithmetic problems (e.g., 15 + 13 = 28 vs. 28 = 28, respectively). Children then solved math equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 9 + 5 = 6 + __),…