This article reports on an empirical study that investigates the way students' performance in solving arithmetical tasks may be related to their performance in solving algebraic tasks. The sample consisted of 203 Grade 6 students. The arithmetical tasks involved arithmetical expressions with known quantities, whereas the algebraic tasks involved…

This study aimed to investigate prospective middle school mathematics teachers' noticing of students' algebraic thinking based on students' correct and incorrect solutions within the context of pattern generalization. Designed as a qualitative case study, three noticing prompts were asked of thirty-two prospective middle school mathematics…

Procedural flexibility is an important skill for algebra. Although prior work has focused on measuring students' procedural flexibility using arithmetic problems, word problems may also capture students' flexibility because of their open-ended nature. To date, no published study has examined the use of word problems as another measure of…

An alternating treatments design was used to analyze the effects of concrete and virtual manipulatives on the duration and number of correctly solved linear equations by three middle school students with cognitive disabilities. Participants physically manipulated algebra tiles to solve an equation during the concrete manipulative condition. During…

Given the relevance of graphs of functions, we consider their inclusion in primary education from the functional approach to early algebra. The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the students' production and reading of graphs when they solved generalization problems from a functional thinking approach. We aim to explore how 3rd and…

Understanding of the equal sign is associated with early algebraic competence in the elementary grades and equation-solving success in middle school. Thus, it is important to find ways to build foundational understanding of the equal sign as a relational symbol. Past work promoted a conception of the equal sign as meaning "the same as".…

This study forms part of a classroom teaching experiment on the development of a group of 25 9-10 years old students' algebraic thinking. More specifically, it explored their reasoning while solving word problems built around functional relationships to determine how they generalized through questions posed using natural language, drawn figures or…

The relation to operands (RO) principles describe the relation between operands and answers in arithmetic problems (e.g., the sum is always larger than its positive addends). Despite being a fundamental property of arithmetic, its empirical relation with arithmetic/algebraic problem solving has seldom been investigated. The current longitudinal…

This study investigated the extent to which domain-general and domain-specific antecedents contributed to pre-algebra's initial level and growth rate among students who experience word-problem difficulty (WPD). We examined if such a profile differs for English-language learners (ELLs; n = 75) and non-ELLs (n = 55) with WPD. We assessed 130 U.S.…

In this quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study we examined the effects of differentiated instruction (DI) in within-class ability groupings of 246 Montenegrin fourth-graders and their ability to solve algebraic equations. We assessed 2 parallel student groups at equal achievement levels to compare DI, in which teaching and work modes were…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a long-standing international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades, collecting trend data every four years since 1995. Over 70 countries rely on TIMSS to monitor their education systems in a global context, benchmarking national curricula and…

We describe 24 third (8-9 years old) and 24 fifth (10-11 years old) graders' generalization working with the same problem involving a function. Generalizing and representing functional relationships are considered key elements in a functional approach to early algebra. Focusing on functional relationships can provide insights into how students…

For students to advance beyond arithmetic, they must learn how to attend to the structure of math notation. This process can be challenging due to students' left-to-right computing tendencies. Brackets are used in mathematics to indicate precedence but can also be used as superfluous cues and perceptual grouping mechanisms in instructional…

New educational technologies that utilize students' interaction data and visualizations provide a means to expand our understanding of learning processes. In this study, we apply two advanced and novel data visualization techniques, called the "Indivisualizer" and a "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle school students (N =…

New educational technologies that utilize students' interaction data and visualizations provide a means to expand our understanding of learning processes. In this study, we apply two advanced and novel data visualization techniques, called the "Indivisualizer" and a "Sankey diagram," to explore how middle school students (N =…