School robotics programmes help students learn science and maths curriculum and acquire needed social skills, such as collaboration. The aim of this observational study was to compare the level of seven variables indicative of student collaborative behaviour (focus, effort/contribution, communication, problem-solving, engagement in inquiry,…

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of class-wide applications of Taped Problems (TP) and Explicit Timing (ET) interventions on digits correct per minute (DCPM) scores. The study also investigated whether initial fluency scores would differentiate intervention effectiveness between TP and ET procedures. Results…

Research evaluating the variables that influence learning has devoted inadequate attention to the influence of the amount of new material presented at one time. The current study evaluated the impact of varying instructional set size (ISS) on the rate at which elementary school students mastered multiplication facts while receiving constant time…

This study investigated the promotion of children's understanding and acquisition of arithmetic concepts and the effects of inhibitory skills. Children in Grades 3, 4, and 5 solved two sets of three-term addition and subtraction problems (e.g., 3 + 24 - 24, 3 + 24 - 22) and completed an inhibition task. Half of the participants received a…

Deaf Children usually achieve lower scores on numerical tasks than normally hearing peers. Explanations for mathematical disabilities in hearing children are based on quantity representation deficits (Geary, 1994) or on deficits in accessing these representations (Rousselle & Noël, 2008). The present study aimed to verify, by means of symbolic…

Of the eight scientific practices highlighted in "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas," the first is for students to develop abilities to ask questions and define problems (NRC 2012). Constructing a range of questions about an object or phenomenon validates not only what students have…

A multiple-baseline design across math-fact sets was used to evaluate the effects of a taped-problems intervention on students' performance with addition facts and their inverses in an intact, rural, second-grade classroom. Results suggested that the procedure was effective in improving fluency on math facts as well as their inverses. Across 3…

Predictions of the Identical Elements (IE) model of arithmetic fact representation (Rickard, 2005; Rickard & Bourne, 1996) about transfer between arithmetic facts were tested in primary school children. The aim of the study was to test whether the IE model, constructed to explain adult performance, also applies to children. The IE model…

First of three experiments compared third graders who had studied worked, two-step arithmetic word problems to those learning through conventional problem solving. The former grouped showed superior test performance. In experiments two and three, children presented with integrated worked examples outperformed those presented with split-source…

Second and third graders from six Dutch elementary schools (N = 168) solved two sets of almost identical addition and subtraction sums at a two-week interval. Inconsistency in strategies, which characterized half the subjects, was related to unfamiliar sums and resulted in misinterpreted errors. (TJH)

Two related studies are reported about the (lack of) activation of real-world knowledge in elementary school students' understanding and solution of school arithmetic word problems. In the first study a set of word problems was collectively administered to 75 fifth-graders during a typical mathematics lesson. Half of the problems were standard…

Variation in syntactic difficulty in arithmetic problems is studied to determine its influence on students' ability to solve problems correctly. Findings in a study of elementary school students indicated syntactic difficulty affects problem solving ability, regardless of sex (f=fiche number). (MH)

Introduces the constructivist theory of mathematical learning, and illustrates its application in a curriculum focusing on fundamental concepts. How knowledge is constructed, how concepts mature, and what it means to learn and to know mathematics are presented. Pedagogical implications of adopting a constructivist perspective on knowledge and…

Studied schemes involved in solving two-step arithmetic word problems in (n=1824) elementary schoolchildren in Israel. Compound schemes and combinations of operations were found to affect the difficulty level of the problems. Appendix includes two versions of the test instrument. (Contains 17 references.) (MKR)