Numerous variants of Kahneman and Tversky's (1972) hospital problem have been used to investigate intuitions about the Empirical Law of Large Numbers (eLLN). A largely separate line of research has focused on interactions between context knowledge and statistical reasoning. The present study merges these two lines of research by analyzing tertiary…

Problem and Project-Based Learning (PBL) emphasise collaborate work on problems relevant to society and emphases the relation between theory and practice. PBL fits engineering students as preparation for their future professions but what about mathematics? Mathematics is not just applied mathematics, but it is also a body of abstract knowledge…

This article reports on a "post hoc" study using a randomised controlled trial with 31,842 students in the Netherlands and an instrument consisting of 21 paired problems. The trial showed a variability in the differences of students' results in solving contextual mathematical problems with either a descriptive or a depictive…

Studies measuring teachers' beliefs quantitatively by using self-report Likert scale instruments often face methodological difficulties. Such difficulties might be due to the fact that those instruments often provide less or no contexts. Whereas, several studies have shown that contexts at school, particularly contexts related to students'…

The aim of this study was to examine the working processes employed by Ghanaian senior high school students when dealing with tiling pool problem algebraically. The study employed survey design, with a total sample of 304 Senior High School Form 1 students from three Senior High Schools in the Central Region of Ghana. Data were collected through…

Research on non-cognitive factors has shown that persistence in the face of challenges plays an important role in learning. However, recent work on wheel-spinning, a type of unproductive persistence where students spend too much time struggling without achieving mastery of skills, show that not all persistence is uniformly beneficial for learning.…

A new visual representation for insight problems permits 22 new quantitative measures; which leads to a detailed diagnosis of a person's (or team's) creative weaknesses; which then leads to prescribing targeted, effective counter-techniques for each weakness. Currently, only two measures are consistently used for insight problem solving: the…

Word problems are prevalent on high-stakes assessments, and success on word problems has implications for grade promotion and graduation. Unfortunately, English Language Learners (ELLs) continue to perform significantly below their native English-speaking peers on mathematics assessments featuring word problems. Little is known about the…

Indigenous people of Dayak tribe in Kalimantan, Indonesia have traditionally relied on a system of mutual cooperation called "handep." The cultural context has an influence on students mathematics learning. The "handep" system might be suitable for modern learning situations to develop mathematical problem-solving skill. The…

Pupils' difficulties in solving word problems continue to attract attention: while researchers highlight the importance of relational reasoning and modelling, school curricula typically use short word problems to develop pupils' knowledge of arithmetic operations and calculation strategies. The Relational Paradigm attributes the leading role in…

The use of technology in elementary mathematics instruction tends to be low-level, despite its affordance of supporting the development of students' high-level reasoning ability. This study builds upon a sociocultural view of learning and was designed to determine what effect a technology-mediated dialogic learning intervention has on third-grade…

Students with learning disabilities struggle with word problems in mathematics classes. Understanding the type of errors students make when working through such mathematical problems can further describe student performance and highlight student difficulties. Through the use of error codes, researchers analyzed the type of errors made by 14 sixth…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the problems teachers preferred in mathematics lessons and student achievement in different types of problems. In accordance with this purpose, nine mathematics teachers were interviewed, and corresponding problems were prepared and administered to 225 eighth-grade students. The…

Arithmetic word-problem solving is an important component of elementary mathematics curricula that links school mathematics to real-life problem solving. The present 3-year longitudinal study examined children's arithmetic word-problem solving through understanding its 2 component processes: number-sentence construction and computation. Chinese…

The link between reading and mathematics achievement is well known, and an important question is whether readability factors in mathematics problems are differentially impacting student groups. Using 20 years of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, we examine how…