Evidence in South Africa of poor performance on word problems points to particular challenges among learners relating to difficulties with, on the one hand, making sense of mathematical word problems and, on the other, moving beyond inefficient counting based calculation methods. While many studies in mathematics education in South Africa have…

Most mathematicians state mathematics is a field of beauty, creativity, and innovation, yet what is echoed by students is not how mathematics allows students to explore, but rather the ways in which it constrains and does not necessitate creativity. In comparison, many students associate coding with freedom, and the ability to create and express…

This research investigates the impact of mathematical problems created with Scratch on the problem-solving skills of 8th-grade middle school students. The research was based on the descriptive design of mixed research approaches. In this direction, the research model was single-group pretest-posttest design, which is a weak experimental design…

Programming activities have the potential to provide a rich context for exploring measurement units in early elementary mathematics. This study examines how a small group of young children (ages 5-6) express their emergent conception of a dynamic linear unit and the measurement concepts they found challenging. Video of an introductory programming…

This paper describes an investigation looking at the underlying mathematics of poker machines. The aim of the investigation is for students to get an appreciation of how poker machines are designed to ensure that in the long-term players will inevitably lose when playing. The first part of this paper describes how students can model a simple poker…

Computational Thinking (CT) is pervasive in our daily lives and is useful for problem-solving. Decision-making is a crucial part of problem-solving. In the extant literature, problem-solving strategies in educational settings are often conveniently attributed to intuition; however, it is well documented that computer programmers might even have…

Though proficiency with computation is highly emphasized in national mathematics standards, students with mathematics difficulty (MD) continue to struggle with computation. To learn more about the differences in computation error patterns between typically achieving students and students with MD, we assessed 478 third-grade students on a measure…

Though proficiency with computation is highly emphasized in national mathematics standards, students with mathematics difficulty (MD) continue to struggle with computation. To learn more about the differences in computation error patterns between typically achieving students and students with MD, we assessed 478 3rd-grade students on a measure of…

Getting students adopt the habits of mind specific to many disciplines can be seen as an anchor that will support them to solve the problems in their daily lives. Starting from this premise, a new subject, featuring the habits of mind and how to use and improve them in educational environments seems to worth thinking on. This article describes an…

The multiplication principle is a fundamental principle in enumerative combinatorics. It underpins many of the counting formulas students learn, and it provides much-needed justification for why counting works as it does. However, given its importance, the way in which it is presented in textbooks is surprisingly varied. In this paper, we document…

Increasingly, students are expected to write about mathematics. Mathematics writing may be informal (e.g., journals, exit slips) or formal (e.g., writing prompts on high-stakes mathematics assessments). In order to develop an effective mathematics-writing intervention, research needs to be conducted on how students organize mathematics writing and…

This manuscript reviews the empirical literature of the TouchMath© instructional program. The TouchMath© program is a commercial mathematics series that uses a dot notation system to provide multisensory instruction of computation skills. Using the program, students are taught to solve computational tasks in a multisensory manner that does not…

This study reports on the statistical content of five U.S. textbook series written for elementary students in grades 1-5. The researchers examined 17,688 pages and coded 7445 statistical tasks to determine (1) the distribution of statistical topics within textbooks, and (2) the relative emphasis on the phases of the statistical problem solving…

The use of problem-solving strategies by 59 deaf and hard of hearing children, grades K-3, was investigated. The children were asked to solve 9 arithmetic story problems presented to them in American Sign Language. The researchers found that while the children used the same general types of strategies that are used by hearing children (i.e.,…

The aim of this article is to present a scheme for coding and categorizing students' written explanations of mathematical problem-solving activities. The scheme was used successfully within a study project carried out to determine whether student problem-solving behaviour could be positively affected by writing explanatory strategies to…