This research study examined the development of 43 preservice elementary school teachers' conceptual understanding of place value after participating in a research-based constructivist unit of instruction in place value. The preservice teachers were enrolled in one of three terms of an elementary mathematics methods course in a private midwestern…

Widespread concern has been expressed about the persistent low mathematics achievement of students in the US, particularly for students from low-income and minority backgrounds and students with disabilities. Instructional gaming technology, when designed and fictionalized well, has the potential to improve the motivation and mathematics…

This paper reports on an ethnographically based study of entry level supermarket work. The study, carried out in a large suburban supermarket in Auckland, New Zealand, focused on the literacy and numeracy practices of supermarket assistants, all who had English as an additional language. It found that skills such as oral communication, personal…

The residue number system (RNS) has been an important research field in computer arithmetic for many decades, mainly because of its carry-free nature, which can provide high-performance computing architectures with superior delay specifications. Recently, research on RNS has found new directions that have resulted in the introduction of efficient…

The importance of student understanding of the concept of place value cannot be underestimated. Place value is a "gate keeper" in developing mathematical understanding. The purpose of this study was to examine and develop a teacher-made test of place value knowledge. The questions were developed using the progressions from the Number…

This article illustrates how activities or tasks can be designed that are based on the Necessity Principle. Two sections illustrate how tasks can be formulated to provoke the need to use two mathematical ideas--prime factorization and least common multiple. In each section, the author presents two examples to illustrate how some mathematical tasks…

This paper examines the way two 10th graders cope with a non-standard generalisation problem that involves elementary concepts of number theory (more specifically linear Diophantine equations) in the geometrical context of a rectangle's area. Emphasis is given on how the students' past experience of problem solving (expressed through interplay…

This report provides evidence of the influence of a tutorial "communication game" on fifth graders' generative understanding of the integer number line. Students matched for classroom and pretest score were randomly assigned to a tutorial (n = 19) and control group (n = 19). The tutorial group students played a 13-problem game in which…

In recent years, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. Developmental studies have shown specific effects of the structure of the individual finger counting system on arithmetic abilities. Moreover, the orientation of the mental quantity representation ("number line") seems to be…

This study explored how mathematics content and methods courses for preservice elementary and middle school teachers could be improved through the integration of a set of instructional materials based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). A set of eight instructional modules was developed and tested. The study involved 7…

Early measures of mathematics skill and development have focused on early numeracy skills like counting, number identification, and sequencing of numbers. This study attempted to expand early mathematics assessment. Six new measures of early mathematics skill competence were developed and evaluated. Four existing measures also were examined.…

This article characterizes the development of a deep and connected body of mathematical knowledge categorized by Ball and Bass' (2003b) model of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), as Specialized Content Knowledge for Teaching (SCK) in algebraic reasoning and number sense. The research employed multiple cases across three years from two…

This article deals with a brief history of Fibonacci's life and career. It includes Fibonacci's major mathematical discoveries to establish that he was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the Medieval Period. Special attention is given to the Fibonacci numbers, the golden number and the Lucas numbers and their fundamental…

Developmental predictors of children's fraction concepts and procedures at the end of fourth grade were investigated in a 2-year longitudinal study. Participants were 357 children who started the study in third grade. Attentive behavior, language, nonverbal reasoning, number line estimation, calculation fluency, and reading fluency each…

How can teachers encourage their geography students to make sense of big numbers? The key math skills geography students need to apply are ones they learned long ago in fifth grade: estimation and place value. However, in order to recognize the size of a city, or strength of a country's per capita income, or value of a birth rate, they need…