Using a game-based context and concentrating explicitly on language, students in the early years are able to make sense about place value amid the vagaries of the English language in naming numbers. This conceptual approach to understanding place value allows students to further develop number strategies beyond counting by ones.

Very recently, in the "Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT)/Australian Industry Group quantitative report" (2014), concerns were raised that school mathematics is lacking real world application. This report highlighted the gaps between school mathematics and the requirements of the workplace. After interviewing industry…

Lorraine Day and Derek Hurrell provide a convincing argument for using arrays to promote students' understandings of mental computation strategies for multiplication. They also provide a range of different examples that illustrate the benefits of arrays in the primary classroom.

Stephen Tucker presents a fractions game that addresses a range of fraction concepts including equivalence and computation. The REFractions game also improves students' fluency with representing, comparing and adding fractions.

In the middle years of school, it is important that mathematics is challenging, engaging and focuses on worthwhile mathematics. In this article, Anne Roche describes a lesson that seemed to have all three of these characteristics, as students grappled with issues of scale to create a fun run, given a range of challenging mathematical constraints.…

Curriculum reform aimed at improving students' reasoning strategies for calculating was the focus of a research project in which the authors participated along with two school communities in regional Victoria. Another focus of the research was assisting teachers to gain insight into how their students approached calculations. This article explores…

As a result of conversations with students, previous teaching experiences, and through reading relevant literature, this author was aware that many students struggle with understanding fraction concepts. In particular, she knew that students had difficulty with reading, renaming, ordering, interpreting, and applying common fractions, fraction…

The author recently read a research paper by Padberg (2002), in which the development of understanding associated with decimal fractions was studied. Padberg (2002) outlined the situation that existed in Germany, where students were introduced to decimal fractions in the sixth year of school. He claimed that it was assumed students would have a…