Concepts and practices are widely used to assess students' development in computational thinking (CT). However, less is known about how the development of each construct relates to that of the other. With a sample of 997 grade 6 students (average age = 11.43 at the beginning of the school year) from 14 primary schools, we examined the…

This article presents a set of "work-sharing routines," which teachers can use to broaden their repertoire of using student work, with an eye toward cultivating students' belonging. The authors define work-sharing as using actual mathematical student work, ideally from students in the class, to facilitate learning. Although there are…

This study sought to understand how students activate number sense in determining the position of fractions on a number line and identify how the natural number bias and number sense influences students' thinking processes. The study utilized the Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), involving four fifth-grade elementary students as the research…

This conceptual paper discusses two frameworks, developed independently by the lead author, that will provide the conceptual foundation for the identification and evaluation of mental computation strategies students demonstrate during an upcoming research project entitled Mental Computation in Year 5. These frameworks will be used by the lead…

Students' understanding of the meaning of the equal sign develops slowly over the primary grades. In addition to updating their representations of equations to recognize that the equal sign represents an equivalence relation rather than signaling an operation, students need to move beyond full computation to efficiently solve equivalence problems.…

Every educator knows the sinking feeling of a lesson gone wrong. As teachers look around the room and realize that many of their students are just not getting it, they often feel like failures. However, the struggle students experience as they persevere through high-quality challenging tasks is not a sign of failure, but rather a key aspect of…

When teaching the multiplicative domain in New Zealand primary schools, teachers tend to spend a greater proportion of time on the meaning and processes of multiplication, to the detriment of a specific focus on understanding the concept of division. When division is taught, it tends to be by reversing the context and turning the division…

This article aims to show some activities based on non-routine problems with different levels of difficulty and from different classes that are integrated into the curriculum, additionally two spaces were opened for students to interact with recreational mathematics activities with the purpose of providing opportunities to all students access the…

Adopting a pretest-posttest experimental design with repeated measures, this study examined the effects of three types of game-based learning supports in the form of modeling on knowledge development that contributed to successful math problem solving and students' perceived game flow. Forty-one sixth-grade students participated in the study and…

Enhancing the mathematical problem solving and conceptual understanding of Year 6 students was the goal for a team of primary teachers. For this purpose, they investigated a teaching approach involving Challenging Tasks as a Professional Learning Community. The process followed by the team is outlined, and the impact on teaching and learning is…

This study examined the impact of STEM applications realized with 4th-grade elementary school students on their problem-solving skills. The study was conducted within the convergent parallel design framework, a mixed research method. The research was carried out with 42 4th-grade primary school students, 21 in the experimental group and 21 in the…

Productive failure has shown positive effects on conceptual and transfer measures, but no clear effects on procedural measures. It is therefore an open question whether, and to what extent, productive failure methods may be used to enhance the learning of procedural skills. A typical productive failure study focuses on a single, complex concept;…

Digital instructional tools, such as virtual manipulatives, have been widely adopted as an enhanced approach to inquiry-based learning. However, the optimal ratio of mobile devices to students in instructional settings remain controversial. This research introduced a counterbalanced quasi-experiment to compare the learning performance and…

The current study assessed whether adding worked examples with self-explanation prompts focused on making connections between mathematical principles, procedures, and concepts of rational numbers to a curriculum focused on invented strategies improves pre-algebra students' fraction number line acuity, rational number concepts and procedures.…

Using a randomized controlled trial, we examined the effect of a fractions intervention for students experiencing mathematical difficulties in Grade 5. Students who were eligible for the study (n = 205) were randomly assigned to intervention and comparison conditions, blocked by teacher. The intervention used systematic, explicit instruction and…