This paper reports one aspect of a larger study which looked at the strategies used by a selection of grade 6 students to solve six non-routine mathematical problems. The data revealed that the students exhibited many of the behaviours identified in the literature as being associated with novice and expert problem solvers. However, the categories…

Despite its importance in mathematical problem solving, verification receives rather little attention by the students in classrooms, especially at the primary school level. Under the hypotheses that (a) non-standard tasks create a feeling of uncertainty that stimulates the students to proceed to verification processes and (b) computational…

This article communicates findings from a year-long constructivist teaching experiment about the relationship between four sixth-grade students' multiplicative structures and their construction of improper fractions. Students' multiplicative structures are the units coordinations that they can take as given prior to activity--i.e., the units…

In individual interviews, 220 students in grades 4, 6, 8, and 9 were given one task, and 72 eighth graders were given three tasks to answer two questions: (a) Is a square the unit of measurement for an area for students in grades 4-8? and (b) Does a square have a space-covering characteristic for students in grade 8? The answers to both questions…