Sixty (35 girls and 25 boys) 9th-grade students' conceptual understanding of the number line was qualitatively assessed through verbal explanations and visual representations. The assessment included an open-ended question focused on students' number line descriptions and the explanations coalesced around six features: sequential ordering (i.e.,…

Students' ability to operate with increasingly more complex units has been shown to be a key factor in their conceptual development. These abilities have been characterized as "stages of units coordination." This article focuses on the domain of composing and decomposing composite units. Using data from a teaching experiment with a…

Mastery of mathematics depends on the people's ability to manipulate and abstract values such as negative numbers. Knowledge of arithmetic principles does not necessarily generalize from positive number arithmetic to arithmetic involving negative numbers (Prather & Alibali, 2008, https://doi-org.bibliotheek.ehb.be/10.1080/03640210701864147). In this study, we…

Children vary widely in their number knowledge by the time they enter kindergarten, and this variation is related to their future academic success. Although talk about number predicts children's early understanding of foundational number concepts, we know little about whether interventions can increase this talk nor about the types of number talk…

This article describes students learning to build their own numbering system by recognizing and identifying patterns with interlocking cubes in different place values. The students used the Egyptian hieroglyphic numeral system in conjunction with this activity to connect learning in other subjects. Students used prior knowledge of place value to…

As students have struggled to use the "chip model" (i.e., red and yellow chips representing positive and negative numbers) to model integer addition and subtraction and have found it confusing, the authors developed a series of activities based on adding and removing opposite objects to and from a boat to better help students in this…

The study examines the levels of understanding logarithmic expressions within the frames of a mathematical card game. The game is based on the popular card game Saboteur. In this paper, we analyse the progress of a group of six undergraduate students participating in a remedial course using games for recalling some fundamental mathematical…

Our mental representation of the infinite has received little research attention in cognitive psychology. In countably infinite sets, the infinity symbol (8) is presumed to be perceived as larger than any finite natural number. The present study sought to explore if the infinity symbol is processed as "larger than" natural numbers, and,…

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains;…

Early mathematics plays an important role in introducing foundational concepts for number sense in children. One of the critical areas of learning is the establishment of a linear view of numbers. It is essential to create opportunities for young children to understand that numbers are equally spaced on the number line and that they increase in…

The give-"n" task is widely used in developmental psychology to indicate young children's knowledge or use of the cardinality principle (CP): the last number word used in the counting process indicates the total number of items in a collection. Fuson (1988) distinguished between the CP, which she called the count-cardinal concept, and…

There is growing interest in mathematics learning progressions in early childhood education. Counting is a skill usually developed early in life. The application of the counting principles in early childhood typically entails counting objects. This poses challenges for learning about zero. Indeed, the word "zero" is seldom used in the…

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…

Reimagining elementary mathematics pedagogy using a three-step process--See It, Say It, Symbolize It--author Patrick L. Sullivan provides a guide for developing a dynamic and flexible understanding of numbers and operations. By helping students develop a language that is consistent across concepts and connecting it to what is seen and symbolized,…

This study examined the effects of the concrete-representational-abstract integrated sequence (CRA-I) on teaching place value concepts and their application. The research questions addressed the extent to which CRA-I changed student performance in (a) completing equations that required subtraction with regrouping in the tens place, (b) completing…