All students should have access to learning experiences that help them make sense of important mathematical concepts. This study highlights teacher actions for consolidating student learning during teacher-lead discussion in the early years. We report on a case study of a Year 1 teacher involving a lesson observation. Highlights of the lesson…

Making accurate judgements and interpretations about student growth and progress in mathematics can be problematic when using open-ended assessments. This study reports on the development of a class-based assessment instrument and marking key designed to assess Year 2 students' mathematics competence to reflect their learning of mathematics…

This paper reports on early years teachers and how often they should devote planning time to anticipating student responses in advance of the lesson. Sixty-five Foundation to Year 2 teachers (students 5-8 years of age) completed questionnaires at the beginning and end of a year-long research-based professional development program. Participants…

The use of enabling and extending prompts allows tasks to be both accessible and challenging within a classroom. This article provides an example of how to use enabling and extending prompts effectively when employing a challenging task in Year 2.

The current investigation systematically contrasted teaching with cognitively demanding (challenging) tasks using a task-first lesson structure with that of a teach-first lesson structure in a primary school setting (Year 1 and 2). The findings indicate that there is more than one way of incorporating challenge tasks into mathematics lessons to…

Engaging students in a challenging (cognitively demanding) task and launching a mathematics lesson with a task before instruction are two characteristics of a reform-oriented approach to mathematics instruction often considered together. The authors systematically contrasted teaching with challenging tasks using a task-first lesson structure with…

There is a growing awareness that many children are not developing fast and accurate retrieval-based strategies for solving single-digit addition problems. In this study we individually assessed 166 third and fourth grade children to identify a group of children (called accurate-min-counters) who frequently solved simple single-digit addition…