Many people have serious difficulties in understanding rational numbers, limiting their ability to interpret and make use of them in modern daily life. This also leads to later difficulties in learning more advanced mathematical content. In this study, novel tasks are used to measure 263 late primary school students' spontaneous focusing on…

Finnish students' success on all three content domains of each of the four cycles of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has created much international interest. It has also prompted Finnish academics to offer systemic explanations typically linked to the structural qualities of Finnish schooling and teacher education.…

What would be one of the most sensible ways for a country to invest to achieve maximal economic growth? A recent study (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2011) by economists at Harvard and Columbia Universities shows that better teacher quality results in significantly higher students' lifetime earnings. And investing in public school teachers…

Using Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 eighth-grade international dataset, this study explored the profiles of instructional practices reported by high- and low-performing mathematics teachers across the US, Finland, Korea, and Russia. Concepts of conceptual teaching and procedural teaching were used to frame the…