This article addresses issues in equitable and quality STEM education, and comes at a significant time as students, educators, and policymakers strive to meet federal and state standards such as the Mathematics Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). CCSS and NGSS require significantly higher levels of…

This study comes at an opportune moment for Japanese and U.S. educators, policymakers, and researchers given the trends of global policy and equity-based reform. Discussions of academic achievement in both societies allow us to examine accessibility in mathematics education in order to best prepare teachers to serve the needs of students.…

This paper explores the relationship between social backgrounds and geographical locations with mathematical achievement. Using the national testing system in Australia, correlations between the variables were explored and it was found that students from rural and low SES backgrounds are still being marginalised in school mathematics--in terms of…

This study focuses on students in first year environmental science degree programs, where traditionally mathematical emphasis has been much less than within the strict science or math majors. The importance now placed on applied mathematics, however, means that students need to gain more conceptual and quantitative knowledge of mathematics in not…

Chinese pre-school children perform well in learning mathematics compared with English-speaking children. This study investigates the scenes behind Chinese preschool children's mathematics performance using teacher questionnaires and interviews. Results indicated that the Chinese number system appeared to afford advantages to Chinese children…

The present study examined the structure of elementary pre-service teachers' mathematics anxiety and mathematics teaching anxiety by asking whether the two systems of anxiety are related. The Turkish Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale Short Version and the Mathematics Teaching Anxiety Scale were administered to 260 elementary pre-service…

This qualitative study examined middle school students' performance, solution strategies, difficulties and the underlying reasons for their difficulties in calculating the volume of a rectangular prism. The data was collected from 35 middle school students (6th, 7th and 8th grade students) enrolled in a private school in Istanbul, Turkey. The…

Mathematics textbooks are a predominant resource in primary school in Greece, as well as in many other countries. The present study reports on both a content analysis of Greek mathematics textbooks with regard to the types of word problems represented in them and a quantitative analysis of children's achievement in these problems. For the…

Mathematics educators have had a long standing interest in students' understanding of decimal numbers. Most studies of students' understanding of decimals have been conducted within Western cultural settings. Similar research in other countries is important for a number of reasons, perhaps most importantly because it can provide insights…

This study comes at an opportune moment for Japanese and U.S. educators, policymakers, and researchers given the trends of global policy and equity-based reform. Discussions of academic achievement in both societies allows us to examine mathematics education as a public good versus private commodity in order to best serve the needs of students.…

In this article, we present and discuss an example of how teachers' discussions of mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) items elicited their beliefs about the knowledge needed to teach mathematics. One category of MKT is "horizon content knowledge," and this can be described as mathematical knowledge not directly deployed in…

This paper examines how mathematical understandings might emerge through student-centred inquiry. Data is drawn from a research project on student-centred curriculum integration that situated mathematics within authentic problem-solving contexts and involved students in collaboratively constructed curriculum. The project involved case studies in…

Research has shown students can identify practices considered appropriate for achieving when learning mathematics (Kershner & Pointon, 2000; McCullum, Hargreaves & Gripps, 2000). Yet, if you listen to students talking about the practices they consider important to succeed, and then observe the same students working in their mathematics…

Teachers are tasked with supporting students' learning of abstract mathematical concepts. Students can represent their mathematical understanding in a variety of modes, for example: manipulatives, pictures, diagrams, spoken languages, and written symbols. Although most students easily pick up rudimentary knowledge through the use of concrete…

In this article, we explore the mathematical content knowledge of one entire cohort of pre-service teachers (N = 107) through analysing their performance in a Secondary Mathematics Audit that was developed for the International Comparative Studies in Mathematics Teacher Training that was initiated by the University of Plymouth. We study how their…