This paper offers some reflections on the difficulties of teaching mathematical modeling to students taking higher education courses in which modeling plays a significant role. In the author's experience, other aspects of the model development process often cause problems rather than the use of mathematics. Since these other aspects involve…

Problem solving theory and practice suggest that thinking is more important to solving problems than knowledge and that it is possible to teach thinking in situations where little or no knowledge of the problem is needed. Such an assumption has led problem solving advocates to champion "content-less heuristics" as the primary element of problem…

In this article, I model how a problem-posing framework can be used to enhance our abilities to systematically generate mathematical problems by modifying the attributes of a given problem. The problem-posing model calls for the application of the following fundamental mathematical processes: proving, reversing, specializing, generalizing, and…

The purpose of this study was to measure student attitudes toward and conceptions about statistics, both before and after an introductory undergraduate college statistics class. Relationships between those attitudes and conceptions, as well as their relationships to achievement in statistics, were also studied. Significant correlations were found…

Females, students of color, and students of low socioeconomic status (SES) are often underserved or marginalized in mathematics education. However, some instructional approaches and intervention programs have been shown to educate these students more equitably. This study examines how girls of diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds…

The purpose of this paper is to describe and reflect on the changes in the new elementary mathematics teacher education curriculum in Turkey. It is our goal to share the revised teacher education curriculum with the outside mathematics teacher education community. The paper is organized around four major sections: An overview of the teacher…

In recent years professional developers have reached a consensus about what constitutes effective professional development, referred to in the literature as "learner-centered professional development." InterMath is a professional development project that was developed to address the recommendations for high quality professional development for…

Leaders in professional development have called for more learner-centered professional development opportunities for teachers. These approaches allow teachers to have some choice about the content and pedagogies on which they focus during professional development courses. This paper shares case studies of three participants from InterMath, a …

InterMath participants spend time in workshops exploring technology-rich mathematical investigations and completing write-ups. These write-ups include a written explanation of their problem solving process, screen captures of files that they generated while completing the investigation and links to these files. This paper examines the use of…

The ability to integrate technology into instruction is among the characteristics of a competent mathematics teacher. Research indicates that the vast majority of teachers in Turkey believe the use of computers in education is important, but have limited knowledge and experience on how to use technology in their instruction. This paper describes…

This paper articulates a perspective on learning to discuss ways in which students develop personal sense and negotiate meaning in a middle school algebra context. Building on a sociocultural perspective that incorporates mental objects, learning is described as a mutually dependent process involving personal sense making and the public…

Learning how to use mathematics curriculum materials to create learning opportunities is an important part of the work of teaching. This paper presents findings from a study involving 15 elementary preservice teachers enrolled in, first, a content and, then, a methods course, and discusses the extent to which three curriculum interventions…

Direct and indirect effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and previous mathematics achievement on high school advanced mathematics course taking were explored. Structural equation modeling was carried out on data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study: 1988 database. The two variables were placed in a model together with the mediating…

This study investigated the effectiveness of collaboration between college lecturers and student peers in assessing the instructional practice of in-service student teachers (ISTs). The study was inspired by criticisms that college lecturers' assessments were not producing valid critiques of ISTs' mathematical and pedagogical competencies to…

In a secondary school mathematics teaching methods course, a research team engaged 22 preservice secondary teachers (PSTs) in designing and posing tasks to algebra students through weekly letter writing. The goal of the tasks was for PSTs to elicit responses that would indicate student engagement in the mathematical processes described by NCTM…