Learners in general struggle when working with word problems. South African learners in particular have an added barrier owing to the many official languages that have been legislated. The South African Department of Basic Education, through its curriculum statements, envisages that problem solving will play a fundamental part in mathematics…

Making drawings can help students avoid and overcome difficulties they encounter when solving real-world (or modeling) problems. However, many students do not make drawings spontaneously. In the present study, 132 students in Grades 9 and 10 were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions "with situational or mathematical drawing…

We report on the construction, validation, and implementation of an instrument for measuring students' strategic knowledge about drawing for geometry modelling problems, namely, the "strategic knowledge about drawing scale." We conducted a qualitative study and a quantitative study to validate the proposed construction and interpretation…

The goal of the study was to reconstruct and dismantle a sequence of events that preceded an insight solution to a challenging problem by a ninth-grade student. A three-week long solution process was analysed by means of the theory of shifts of attention. We argue that concurrent focusing on what, how and why the student attends to when working on…

A usability study was conducted by the Research and Innovation Network and Assessment Solutions Design to assess the usability of a drawing response interaction type. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) commissioned a multi-part study to determine the viability of using the drawing response interaction on…