Group work has been a main activity recommended by mathematics education reform. We aim at describing the patterns of interaction between teachers and students during group work. We ask: How do teachers scaffold group work during a problem-based lesson? We use data from a problem-based lesson taught in six geometry class periods by two teachers…

This article reports on students' problem-solving approaches across three representations--number lines, coordinate planes, and function graphs--the axes of which conventional mathematics treats in terms of consistent geometric and numeric coordinations. I consider these representations to be a part of a "hierarchical representational…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the type, pattern, and complexity of Internet reading strategies used by seven accomplished high school readers. Individual participants performed an academic Internet reading task with the goal of developing critical questions about their chosen controversial topic. Strategies for Internet reading were…

While many studies have considered the association between teachers' and students' conceptions of teaching and learning and classroom practices, few studies have researched the influence of teachers' conceptions on students' conceptions. Our objective was to analyze the influence of music teachers' conceptions on student…

Master narratives frame students' historical knowledge, possibly hindering access to more historical representations. A detailed analysis of students' historical narratives about the origins of their own nation is presented in terms of four master narrative characteristics related to the historical subject, national identification, the…

This study, based on observation of 90 fifth-grade mathematics classes in Chinese elementary schools, examined how the task features, high cognitive demand, multiple representations, and multiple solution methods may relate to classroom discourse. Results indicate that high cognitive demand tasks were associated with teachers' use higher…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that instruction with graphically integrated representations of whole and sectional neuroanatomy is especially effective for learning to recognize neural structures in sectional imagery (such as magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]). Neuroanatomy was taught to two groups of participants using computer…

This study investigates whether Virtual Manipulatives (VM) within a Physical Manipulatives (PM)-oriented curriculum affect conceptual understanding of electric circuits and related experimentation processes. A pre-post comparison study randomly assigned 194 undergraduates in an introductory physics course to one of five conditions: three…

Achieving fluency with basic subtraction and add-with-8 or -9 combinations is difficult for primary grade children. A 9-month training experiment entailed evaluating the efficacy of software designed to promote such fluency via guided learning of reasoning strategies. Seventy-five eligible first graders were randomly assigned to one of three…

This research investigated how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in middle school mathematics instruction. We videotaped 18 lessons (3 from each of 6 teachers), and within each, we identified "linking episodes"--segments of discourse in which the teacher connected mathematical ideas. For each…

While preschool-aged children display some skills with quantitative relations, later learning of related fraction concepts is difficult for many students. We present two studies that investigate young children's tendency of Spontaneous Focusing On quantitative Relations (SFOR), which may help explain individual differences in the development…

People often justify history's place in the curriculum by its relationship to citizenship, yet there is little research to help educators picture how people use historical knowledge for civic purposes. This expert-novice study used the think-aloud method to examine how eight political scientists and eight high school students employed…

External number representations are commonly used throughout the first years of instruction. The twenty-frame is a grid that contains two rows of 10 dots each, and within each row, dots are organized in two groups of five. The assumption is that children can make use of these structures for enumerating the dots, rather than relying on one-by-one…

Ambitious teaching is a form of teaching that requires a high level of teacher responsiveness to what students do as they actively engage with the subject matter. Thus, a teacher enacting ambitious teaching is often confronted with uncertainties about how to advance students' learning while also building on students' contributions. In…

This article describes the initial implementation of an innovative program for elementary-age children involving origami and pop-up paper engineering to promote visuospatial thinking. While spatial ability measures correlate with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success, a focus on spatial thinking is all but missing in elementary…