Many teachers labor to distinguish between productive and unproductive struggle; they believe that struggle is productive when it engages students in thinking and communicating metacognitively, which is when students think and communicate about their problem-solving processes, strategies, challenges, and successes. One method that helps ensure…

Students in the elementary grades often experience difficulty setting up and solving word problems. Using an equation to represent the structure of the problem serves as an effective tool for solving word problems, but students may require specific pre-algebraic reasoning instruction about the equal sign as a relational symbol to set up and solve…

This article details the adaptation of the FOCUS (Fundamentals of Conceptual Understanding and Success) model (Mireles, Acee, & Gerber, 2014) implemented to improve student success in general education and developmental mathematics at a four-year rural university. The model has been demonstrated successful when implemented at a four-year large…

Tutorials in introductory physics (TIP) are a well known resource for use in third level insititutions for developing students' understanding of physics concepts. However, this resource is only sparingly used at second level. This study presents an adaptation of the approach taken in TIP to enhance the understanding of vector addition of a group…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate preservice teachers' understanding of factorisation, a topic not explicitly taught within their teacher education programme, but one they will be required to teach when they graduate. We query if the knowledge they bring from secondary school, prepares them sufficiently to teach their future…

This article examines how student learning is affected by the use of team-based inquiry learning, a novel pedagogy in mathematics that uses team-based learning to implement inquiry-based learning. We conducted quasi-experimental and observational studies in intermediate level mathematics courses, finding that team-based inquiry learning led to…

The literature shows that the integration of technological tools, like "GeoGebra," has the potential to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics. The aim of this study was to see whether "GeoGebra" could be used to address identified, systematic misconceptions that National Certificate Vocational (NCV) students hold…

The narrative permeating higher education institutions globally is the assimilation of advancing information and communications technology into mainstream Mathematics Education. In this paper we report on a mixed mode case study which explored possible mathematical gaps that created barrier/s when engineering students (n=162) worked with the…

Researching students' responses to tasks at different year levels and in varied curriculum contexts can provide insights that relate their understandings to prior learning experiences and teaching approaches. In this article, we discuss evidence of students from three curriculum contexts (English, Australian, and Israeli) (n = 350) ways of…

In the study reported on here, we investigated the effects of the use of dynamic geometry software (DGS) (i.e., GeoGebra) on learners' learning and a teacher's beliefs. The learners and teacher involved in the study were from a high-poverty, rural high school in South Africa. We compared grade 11 learners (N = 56) who used GeoGebra in the context…

The reversal error is a prevalent phenomenon that consists of reversing the relationship between two variables when writing equations from comparison in verbal language. A study with 169 Basque/Spanish bilingual pre-service teachers examined whether this error is mainly due to the students' tendency to employ a direct-translation strategy based on…