The fear of making mistakes and avoidance of risks can create disabling anxiety and limit learning opportunities. However, it is possible to teach mathematics in ways that not only reduce student agency but also have the effect of excluding some students. This article proposes approaches that are intended to both foster student decision making and…

The authors describe a mathematics lesson designed to allow students to use their own thinking to solve elapsed time problems. Their approach emphasises student-centered structured inquiry, and follows a 'Launch, Explore and Summarise' format.

While the general planning advice offered to mathematics teachers seems to be to start with simple examples and build complexity progressively, the research reported in this article is a contribution to the body of literature that argues the reverse. That is, posing of appropriately complex tasks may actually prompt the use of more sophisticated…

This study explored the potential of a rich assessment task to reveal students' multiplicative thinking in respect to a hypothetical learning trajectory. Thirty pairs of students in grades 5 and 6 attempted the task. Twenty-two pairs applied multiplicative structure to find the number of items in arrays. However counting and computational errors…