This article features a fifth grade mathematics exploration planned to facilitate students' productive struggle. The exploration was a catalyst for a team of educators to unpack the teacher's experience when facilitating students' productive struggle. The team called this "teacher productive struggle" and shares about the construct…

Since its first notable appearance in the "Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning," the phrase productive struggle has garnered support from a few, yet very influential, educational researchers. However, since the phrase was popularized by Hiroko Warshauer in 2011, examinations of the productive struggle have…

Mathematics is not seen as an absolute corpus of well-founded knowledge anymore, but as a human activity, a social phenomenon, part of human culture that evolves historically and intelligibly in a social context. By harnessing the indigenous cultures and their knowledge systems in-depth, this article aims to evaluate how the sustainable…

Most mathematical ideas can be taught with simplicity. It may be necessary to give up the phrase "mathematics education" and replace it with "basic quantitative literacy." (Author)

A mathematics laboratory should be a learning environment where many young minds decide that mathematics is more than practicing "sums" that the teacher assigns. (Author)

Criticizes the DPPC Method (Direct, Pure, Piecemeal, and Complete) of mathematics instruction which is designed to enable the lower ninety percent to become proficient in problem solving. Suggests that this method is deceptive since students learn to follow a prescribed recipe rather than becoming problem solvers. (JR)

After two decades of efforts at curriculum reform, the United States has yet seriously to embark on the task of developing an active learning approach to mathematics in the elementary schools. (Author)

Reports on a study that focused on three teachers and their ways of teaching problem solving. Findings indicate that the participants unconsciously constructed personal metaphors that became the basis of their conceptualization of problems. "Community", "adventure" and "game" were the key metaphors. The outcome…

To determine the effectiveness of mathematical vocabulary training on the problem solving ability of third and fourth grade students, 66 students were placed into either an experimental or a control group. All were pretested and posttested with an experimental mathematics vocabulary test and with a standardized mathematics test. Mathematical…

Describes grade-appropriate weekly activities designed to appeal directly to students by giving them open-ended questions. Activities may be worked on individually, in pairs, or in small groups. This particular set of activities focuses on stories from literature involving measurement, earning money, marketing a product, and setting up a…

Normally achieving students (n=119) and students with mild handicaps (n=83) in grades 3-6 were instructed to create and answer computation items similar to samples given. Students with mild handicaps understood item characteristics enough to create like items, though averaging three years behind normal achievers. A sample instructional activity is…

Two learning strategies are discussed: (1) fluent and creative idea-production involving concepts and problems, and (2) metacognition, or students' awareness of and direction of their thinking. The sample included college students, as well as teachers who used these strategies in elementary and secondary mathematics classrooms. Techniques for…