Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

Problem solving and reasoning are two key components of becoming numerate. Reports obtained from international assessments show that Australian students' problem solving ability is in a long-term decline. There is little evidence that teachers are embracing problem solving as part of the classroom routine. In this study, we analyse 598 Year 7 to…

Understanding the concept of area requires an understanding of the relationship between geometry and multiplication. The multiplicative reasoning required to find the areas of regular figures is used in many courses in elementary mathematical education. This paper explores various methods in which multiplicative reasoning is incorporated into the…

This study presents the results of a series of design experiments that aimed to engage twelve fourth-grade students in mathematical activity exploring the volume of right prisms and cylinders as a dynamic sweep of a surface through a height, an approach that is referred to as Dynamic Measurement for Volume (DYME-V). This article describes this…

The purpose of this work is to explore alternative geometric pedagogical perspectives concerning justifications to 'fast' multiplication algorithms in a way that fosters opportunities for skill and understanding within younger, or less algebraically inclined, learners. Drawing on a visual strategy to justify these algorithms creates pedagogical…

Making connections within and between different aspects of mathematics is recognised as fundamental to learning mathematics with understanding. However, exactly what these connections are and how they serve the goal of learning mathematics is rarely made explicit in curriculum documents with the result that mathematics tends to be presented as a…

By using high-leverage models to connect student learning experiences to overarching concepts in mathematics, teachers can anchor learning in ways that allow students to make sense of content on the basis of their own prior experiences. A rectangular area model can be used as a tool for understanding problems that involve multiplicative reasoning.…

We report the design of an analog technology, what we refer to as a SunRule, that uses sunlight to model multiplication. Physical models that explore multiplication are fixtures in elementary mathematics classrooms. Our interest in physical models of multiplication was driven by an overarching design problem: How could a physical tool realize a…

Mathematics educators and researchers have advocated for the use of manipulatives to teach mathematics for decades. The purpose of this article is to provide illustrative uses of a readily available manipulative rather than a complete list. From an Australian perspective, Pop-it fidget toys can be used across the mathematics curriculum. This paper…

The capacity to recognise, represent, and reason about relationships between different quantities, that is, to think multiplicatively, has long been recognised as critical to success in school mathematics in the middle years and beyond. Building on recent research that found a strong link between multiplicative thinking and algebraic, geometrical,…

This article examines the development of professional knowledge in pre-service mathematics teachers. From the discussion of a task associated with the multiplication of consecutive integer numbers, generalization is recognized as a process that allows to explore, to explain, and to validate mathematical results, and as an essential ability to…

This study is part of a larger project exploring students' thinking of Dynamic Measurement (DYME), an approach to area measurement that engages students in dynamic digital experiences of measuring rectangular surfaces through sweeping lengths. The goal of this study was to evaluate the extent to which students could bridge the mathematical…

This qualitative research, drawing on the theoretical frameworks by Even (1990, 1993) and Sfard (2007), investigated five high school mathematics teachers' geometric interpretations of complex number multiplication along with the roots of unity. The main finding was that mathematics teachers constructed the modulus, the argument, and the conjugate…

South Africa participated in TIMSS from 1995 to 2015. Over these two decades, some positive changes have been reported on the aggregated mathematics performance patterns of South African learners. This paper focuses on the achievement patterns of South Africa's high-performing Grade 9 learners (n = 3378) in comparison with similar subsamples of…

This article presents a sequence of learning activities that lead to using the area model of multiplication to understand the distributive property (DP). The connection between area and multiplication is an important one, both for algebraic thinking and for geometry, as indicated in two of the critical areas for the third grade in the Common Core…