Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

This ex-post facto quantitative study examined how a comprehensive STEM education program impacts high school students' ACT math and science scores as well as their attitudes toward STEM. Using data from one STEM-designated school, the researcher examined ACT math, science, and STEM results for students who took the ACT in the Spring of 2024,…

Background: Although research clearly demonstrates the importance of motivation in mathematics learning, relatively little is known about the developmental dynamics between different facets of mathematics motivation and performance, especially in the early years of schooling. Aims: In a longitudinal setting, we examined (1) how children's ability…

The current study assessed whether adding worked examples with self-explanation prompts focused on making connections between mathematical principles, procedures, and concepts of rational numbers to a curriculum focused on invented strategies improves pre-algebra students' fraction number line acuity, rational number concepts and procedures.…

Geometry education is an important aspect of STEM education and career development, but it is often overlooked in K-12 education in the United States. Although there is some research on teaching geometry to students with learning difficulties at the elementary level, there is a lack of research on teaching advanced geometry skills at high school…

Young children's early repeating patterning abilities are important foundations for their later mathematical development. Prior studies on young children's repeating patterning abilities have been conducted exclusively in developed countries differing in economic, societal, and educational characteristics from developing countries. In this study,…

Stability is an important underlying assumption in any form of assessment-supported decision-making. Since early years development is frequently described as unstable, the concept plays a central role in the discussion surrounding early years assessment. This paper describes stability as a set of assumptions about the way individual scores change…

Problem Roulette (PR), an online study service at the University of Michigan, offers points-free formative practice to students preparing for examinations in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. Using four years of PR data involving millions of problem attempts by thousands of students, we quantify the benefits…

The paper uses data from the combined TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) assessment in 2011 to explore the subject-specific strengths and weaknesses among fourth grade students worldwide. Previous research came to the conclusion that students only differed in…

There is a general consensus that both conceptual and procedural knowledge are essential for students' mathematical development. A common argument is that differences in mathematical performance are caused by differences in conceptual and procedural knowledge. Therefore, it is important to investigate to what extent such differences in conceptual…

Scientific reasoning is an important skill that encompasses hypothesizing, experimenting, inferencing, evaluating data and drawing conclusions. Previous research found consistent inter- and intra-individual differences in children's ability to perform these component skills, which are still largely unaccounted for. This study examined these…

Research suggests that individual differences in math abilities correlate with approximate representations of quantity that are supported by a primitive Approximate Number System (ANS). However, relatively little research has addressed the direction of this association in early childhood. Here we examined the development of the ANS and math…

Performance evaluation may change employee effort and decisions in unintended ways, for example, in multitask jobs where the evaluation measure captures only a subset of (differentially weights) the job tasks. We show evidence of this multitask distortion in schools, with teachers allocating effort across students (tasks). Teachers are evaluated…

Children's early math abilities have been claimed to depend differentially on various cognitive competencies (e.g., core number skills, working memory, and general math and reading abilities). Clarifying the relative importance of these different cognitive markers in predicting key early math skills would provide a conceptual framework for…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…