How do children learn math--and why do some children struggle with it? The answers are in "Number Sense and Number Nonsense," a straightforward, reader-friendly book for education professionals and an invaluable multidisciplinary resource for researchers. More than a first-ever research synthesis, this highly accessible book brings math…

Determined whether 11 third-grade children, differing in cognitive processing capacity, solve addition and subtraction word problems differently. Results, among others, show that children who differ in cognitive processing capacity also differ in strategies they use to solve the same verbal problems and differ in their success in finding correct…

High school students (n=295) were administered variants of the student-professor problem to ascertain whether errors could be traced to implicit versus explicit relationships between the variables. Concludes that implicit variable relationship problems were harder than explicit variable relationship problems. A follow-up study to explore why is…

Examined is the relationship between junior high school students' directional reasoning about rates and numerical reasoning on proportion-related word problems. The relationship between the ability to solve context-free fraction exercises and the ability to solve mathematically similar word problems is discussed. (KR)

Most studies of children's solution processes on simple addition and subtraction word problems have used individual interviews or the analysis of error patterns on paper-and-pencil tests as the primary data-gathering techniques. The present paper reports an investigation in which the contribution of eye-movement data was explored for studying…

This report presents a summary of research being conducted at the University of Minnesota in which new technologies are being applied to development of cognition in hearing impaired learners. The study involved an application of concept analysis, information-processing theories, and group-based interactive technology in the teaching of…

This study examined the hypothesis that prior experience with augmented-quotient problems would positively influence performance on remainder-only problems and quotient-only problems. Analysis of sixth through eighth grade students' (n=545) responses to test forms that systematically varied the order of appearance of these three division problems,…

Reports a study to examine secondary school students' (n=200) responses to two figurally and spatially similar problems from mathematics and science that require different responses before and after instruction. Results indicated that most students gave the same response to both questions. Reasons for this pattern are discussed. (MDH)

This report describes a computer-based instructional system, the Story Problem Solver (SPS). SPS provides students with instruction about the semantic structure of story problems. It was developed to test a specific schema theory of knowledge organization in long-term memory. For this reason SPS depends explicitly upon a theory of the relationship…

In 1986 the United States (U.S.)-Japan Seminar on Mathematical Problem Solving convened to compare the state of problem solving in the classroom and in research in the two countries. The data and results given in this paper are the results of research conducted in the United States in response to the 1986 seminar. The U.S. and Japanese research…