Students in grades 3-5 are undergoing significant cognitive growth and beginning to understand what fairness and equity mean in a diverse and interconnected world. "Modern Math Tasks to Provoke Transformational Thinking" presents carefully crafted tasks that nurture multi-disciplinary literacies, including ecological and cultural…

Design thinking--a human-centered approach to problem solving--is a process by which K-12 teachers engage students in solving relevant issues that occur in their schools. In this article, the authors describe a project in which fourth-graders used design thinking to solve an unexpected issue related to a much-anticipated class project. The project…

Being able to perform computational estimations efficiently is an important skill. Furthermore, computational estimation experiments are used to study general principles in strategy development. Rounding strategies are common in computational estimation. However, little is known about whether and when children use a mixed-rounding strategy (i.e.,…

Background: Problem-solving as a vehicle to develop independent thinking skills is mostly underestimated and is often either overlooked or not given adequate attention within the existing South African mathematics curriculum. Consequently, numerous learners often display limited skills or lack skills to adequately crack Mathematics problems by…

'Taking part' in conversations requires different activities from the interactants depending on the kind of conversation. This article investigates co-constructions in oral peer group discussions of elementary school children from grades 2 to 6 (7-12 years old). Although dissent is the starting point of argumentations, negotiating processes in…

This study aims to elicit the role of formative feedback in the development of students in a mathematical problem-solving process. For this purpose, the study's primary process is to investigate the development of elementary school students (aged 10 to 11) through feedback given during a problem-solving process. While visually engaged in the…

The aim of this study is to determine the primary school fourth-grade students' understanding of four operation symbols, using them in arithmetic operations and word problems. Phenomenology research design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the research. The participants of the research consist of 123 students, attending the…

Creativity is not only for gifted students, but also for regular ones. This case study was aimed to analyze the appropriateness of tasks and the elaboration of multiple solutions to occasion fourth-graders' mathematical creative thinking through a documentary multiple-solution counting task in a figurative setting. The data came from the written…

The aim of this study is to reveal the meanings that fourth grade students in elementary school attach to the four operation symbols (+, -, x, :) that are abstract, in different representations. The pattern of the study is a case study of qualitative research methods. In the study, the evaluation tool developed by the researchers was applied to…

The statistical properties of data are not present in any individual value, but rather, emerge only by perceiving the set as a whole. Summarizing the statistical properties of sets (e.g., creating ensembles) is ubiquitous in cognition, yet one unanswered question is how this process changes over development. The properties of number sets (e.g.,…

This study attempted determining the impact of the problem-based learning method supported by cartoons, which are humorous elements, in fourth-grade Social Studies course on students' perceptions of their problem-solving skills and their level of achievement. Accordingly, the study is quasi-experimental and has a pre-test post-test unequalled…

We previously (Gantt et al., 2023; Paoletti et al., 2021) identified items from the publicly released TIMSS 2011 assessments that had potential for students to employ covariational reasoning as a solution strategy. In this report, we explore the extent to which fourth-grade students' performance on such items in mathematics differed among 26…

This study explored the relationship between 4th-grade students' functional literacy levels and their problem-solving skills and the effect level of students' functional literacy experiences on their problem-solving ability. Employing the quantitative research approach, relational survey design, one of the general survey designs, was used in the…

It has been suggested that not only domain-specific factors but also working memory (WM) may play a crucial role in mathematical learning included Geometry, but the issue has not been deeply explored. In the present study, we examined the role of domain-specific factors and of verbal versus visuospatial WM on geometric learning of a new…

There have been many efforts to measure pedagogical content knowledge with multiple-choice survey instruments, but little is known about how different types of items contribute. In this study, we examined interviews with 9 Grade 4 teachers to develop a deeper understanding of how teachers select pedagogical representations in the context of a…