The Australian Curriculum suggests that students have transitioned from additive to multiplicative thinking upon entry into secondary school. However, research shows that many students are thinking additively, placing them at a disadvantage to their multiplicative thinking peers. In this paper, early findings from a broader research project…

Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

This paper reports on 73 Grades 3 to 6 students' written responses to equal groups, arrays, multiplicative comparison and Cartesian product word problems. It is part of a larger study relating to students' development of multiplicative thinking (MT). The potential of using multiplicative word problems as a diagnostic assessment to reveal students'…

Progressing from additive to multiplicative thinking is a key outcome of school mathematics, making ratios an essential topic of study in junior secondary. In this study, 15 Australian Year 8 students were administered a ratio test followed by semi-structured interviews to explore their conceptions of ratio prior to formal instruction. In this…

Being able to perform computational estimations efficiently is an important skill. Furthermore, computational estimation experiments are used to study general principles in strategy development. Rounding strategies are common in computational estimation. However, little is known about whether and when children use a mixed-rounding strategy (i.e.,…

In this article, the authors argue that teachers need to possess appropriate understanding and diverse pedagogies to successfully move learners from additive to multiplicative thinking. Herein, they offer five pedagogical strategies that teachers can use to help students make this transition. Some of the challenges of learning multiplicative…

The objective of this case study was to identify the role of finger gestures in learning mathematics informally during play, especially in sociocultural settings. A mathematical activity involving addition was qualitatively analyzed at a Japanese preschool. We explored how the process of subjectification and objectification contributed to a…

Fluency in mathematics is more than adeptly using basic facts or implementing algorithms. It is not about speed or recall. Real fluency is about choosing strategies that are efficient, flexible, lead to accurate solutions, and are appropriate for the given situation. Developing fluency is also a matter of equity and access for all learners. The…

Fraction arithmetic facility is fundamental to learning more advanced math topics. However, attaining the ability to add and subtract fractions is hard for many students. The present longitudinal study examined students' growth on simple addition and subtraction word problems between fourth and sixth grades (N = 536). Latent class growth analyses…

Teachers require support in developing the pedagogical skill of interpreting students' mathematical thinking and providing effective feedback that promotes learning. However, there is a lack of research assessing the quality of feedback based on teacher noticing in mathematics classes. This study analysed 20 preservice teachers' (PSTs) feedback…

Teacher knowledge is one of the main factors in the quality of mathematics learning. Many mathematics teachers have difficulty using proportional reasoning. Proportional reasoning is one of the essential aspects of the middle school mathematics curriculum to develop students' mathematical thinking. Teachers should realize that developing…

This paper draws on numerous data sources to better understand the shift from additive to multiplicative thinking in years 4 to 9. Research studies that have used the Scaffolding Numeracy in the Middle Years assessment tasks have found that while students can be supported to move through the early and upper zones of the Learning and Assessment…

Mathematical writing is one way for primary students to communicate their mathematical thinking. Research in the field of writing has shown that to become an effective teacher of writing, preservice teachers must have experience engaging in the kinds of writing given to their students. The study reported in this paper explored how 27 preservice…

When two third-graders collaboratively manipulated a multi-modal, digital learning device called TouchTimes (hereafter, TT), that introduces multiplication through visual, tangible and symbolic means, their thinking about quantity shifted from being additive to being multiplicative. In this study, I examine the children's interactions around/with…

Previous research demonstrated that some children inappropriately solve multiplicative missing-value word problems additively, while others inappropriately solve additive missing-value word problems multiplicatively. Besides lacking skills, children's preference for additive or multiplicative relations has been shown to contribute to those errors.…