The purpose of this study is to compare the differences of four essential aspects (i.e., representational forms, contextual features, cognitive demand levels, and response types) embedded in mathematical problems within the topics of numbers and operations in mathematics textbooks used in Finland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. This…

Many primary school students have difficulties understanding mathematical equivalence with considerably poorer performance in some countries than in others. However, students' formal understanding of equivalence has significant and long-lasting effects, as it predicts arithmetic and algebra achievement throughout school years. Currently, little is…

The purpose of the study was to explore how contents related to sustainable development were presented in Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean elementary mathematics textbooks. For this purpose, the contents in the textbooks were analyzed at both macro and micro levels through a mixed method research. The results showed that the…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2000) emphasizes the importance of communication in mathematics and mathematics education. Effective mathematical communication is essential in mathematics instruction, as it is a collaborative and social activity between teachers and students (Moschkovich, 2002; Khairunnisa et al., 2020). This…

This article presents a study of the skills of Libyan and Turkish students in their quadratic word problems based on SOLO Taxonomy. The research model used in this study is a case study. The participants were 27 students at a high school in Kastamonu, Turkey and were 27 students at a high school in the city of Tripoli, Libya. The data were…

This study describes an online method of measuring individual students' collaborative problem-solving abilities using four interactive mathematics-based tasks, with students working in pairs. Process stream data were captured from 3,000 students who completed the tasks in the United States, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Singapore, and Finland.…

This paper compares sections on functions and linear functions from two Korean textbooks and an American standards-based textbook (University of Chicago School Mathematics Project [UCSMP] Algebra) to understand differences and similarities among these textbooks through horizontal and vertical analyses. We found that these textbooks provide…

Mathematical problem solving typically involves manipulating visual symbols (e.g., equations), and prior research suggests that those symbols serve as diagrammatic representations (e.g., Landy & Goldstone, 2010). The present work examines the ways that instructional design of student engagement with these diagrammatic representations may…

Students' difficulty in learning and suitably understanding the concept of the algebraic variable has been studied with a number of tools and documented for several populations. Little research has been conducted, however, using the same tool to explore understanding of the notion among populations from different countries in an attempt to…

This study examined how types of tasks influenced student activities/thinking and defined the role of Seatwork in mathematics lessons. It used 60 lessons from the TIMSS videotaped Study. These data indicated that practice was the most prevalent form of tasks in the U.S. In Germany, students completed mathematical calculations after a complex…

This study investigates Chinese and U.S. teachers' construction and use of pedagogical representations surrounding implementation of mathematical tasks. It does this by analyzing video-taped lessons from the Learner's Perspective Study, involving 15 Chinese and 10 U.S. consecutive lessons on the topic of linear equations/linear relations. We…

This study focused on the mathematical content knowledge of prospective teachers in Iceland. The sample was 38 students in the School of Education at the University of Iceland, both graduate and undergraduate students. All of the participants in the study completed a questionnaire survey and 10 were interviewed. The choice of ways to measure the…

Research, from all around the world, has shown that teachers' actions are informed by a variety of factors, including long-held and frequently unarticulated traditions about teaching and learning, systemic expectations of the processes of schooling, available textbooks, traditions of teacher education, school cultures, assessment traditions and…

This study involved an investigation of the relationship between the kinds of solution representations Chinese and U.S. students use and the sorts of pedagogical representations Chinese and U.S. teachers use during instruction. The findings suggest that the representations teachers use influence the representations their students use and, hence,…

In this study we investigated above-average high school calculus students from Japan and the United States in order to determine any differences in their conceptual understanding of calculus and their ability to use algebra to solve traditional calculus problems. We examined and interviewed 18 Calculus BC students in the United States and 26…