In this paper, we identify various forms of geometric work carried out by student teachers who were asked to perform a geometric task for the estimation of a land area. The theory of Mathematical Working Spaces is used to analyze and characterize the work produced. This study provides evidence that students developed forms of geometric work that…

Medical students generally learn to calculate drug doses using paper problems containing numerical information. In contrast, once qualified, they have to extract the relevant information from treatment guidelines and use equipment, such as syringes, to dose patients. We compared students' success in calculating drug doses using those different…

Although counting problems are easy to state and provide rich, accessible problem-solving situations, there is much evidence that students struggle with solving counting problems correctly. With combinatorics (and the study of counting problems) becoming increasingly prevalent in K-12 and undergraduate curricula, there is a need for researchers to…

We discuss a teaching experiment that explored two pre-service secondary teachers' meanings for the unit circle. Our analyses suggest that the participants' initial unit circle meanings predominantly consisted of calculational strategies for relating a given circle to what they called "the unit circle." These strategies did not entail…

In this paper we report the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that when faced with a question involving the inverse direction of a reversible mathematical process, students solve a multiple-choice version by verifying the answers presented to them by the direct method, not by undertaking the actual inverse calculation.…