Barriers to learning can affect educators and students in achieving learning objectives. One of them is the epistemological obstacle caused by the limited context used when a concept is first learned. The purpose of this study was to explore the epistemological obstacles of mathematics students in the concept of limits and functions during online…

In this paper, we provide an overall perspective on the teaching and learning of discrete mathematics. Our aim is to highlight what research has been conducted in this area and to connect it to existing research ideas for future work. We begin by characterizing discrete mathematics and its role in the school curriculum, highlighting themes,…

In this article, the authors share five strategies for using a primary teacher's existing picture book library to create engaging, standard-supporting lessons in mathematics. Because teachers choose the books they read according to their students' interests and concerns, the lessons they create are also more likely to be highly responsive to…

The study aims to investigate students' conceptualisation of the quantum numbers concept through their verbal descriptions and pictorial representations of the corresponding atomic structures. The study was conducted with the participation of 192 12th-grade students from six secondary schools in Northern Greece, via a paper-and-pencil test,…

Preferences for solution methods have an important implication teaching and learning mathematics and students' mathematical performances. In the domain of learning mathematics, there are two modes of processing mathematical information: verbal logical and visual-pictorial. Learners who process mathematical information using verbal logical and…

Young children's symbolic magnitude understanding, or knowledge of how written numerals and number words can be ordered and compared, is thought to play an important role in their mathematical development. There is consistent evidence that symbolic magnitude skills predict mathematical achievement in later childhood and adulthood. Yet less is…

Identifying and addressing the knowledge gap in early numeracy is crucial, given the strong associations between early numeracy skills and later school success. The purpose of this study is to establish current viewpoints and ideas on children's numeracy development via three forms of representation: manipulative, symbolic, and static. The…

Drawing on research around the utility of worked examples, we examine how 29 first- and 27 third-grade students made sense of integer subtraction worked examples and used those examples to solve similar problems. Students first chose which of three worked examples correctly represented an integer subtraction problem and used the example to solve a…

Solving problems involving absolute value is one of the hardest topics for students learning in elementary algebra course. This is an important topic in student's mathematics life since absolute value functions are important example of a function which is continuous on the real line but not differentiable at the origin. A deep understanding of…

Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in people's confidence as they perform number-line estimation, a common spatial-numeric task predictive of math achievement? To investigate this question, we analyzed outcomes from six…

Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in people's confidence as they perform number-line estimation, a common spatial-numeric task predictive of math achievement? To investigate this question, we analyzed outcomes from six…

The notion of flow of a proof encapsulates mathematical, didactical, and contextual aspects of proof presentation. A proof may have different flows, depending on the lecturer's choices regarding its presentation. Adopting Perelman's New Rhetoric (PNR) as a theoretical framework, we designed methods to assess aspects of the flow of a proof. We…

In this commentary, I examine some of the distinctive, foundational difficulties in learning fractions and other types of rational numbers encountered by students with a mathematical learning disability and how these differ from the struggles experienced by students classified as low achieving in math. I discuss evidence indicating that students…

This chapter focuses on the interaction of two first graders as they attempt to make sense of a particular instructional context for learning negative numbers. The context is one where they move an elevator to a building's floors above and below ground in order to model integer addition and subtraction problems. In particular, the focus of the…

Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance…