Teachers' knowledge of the subject matter is considered an important component of their expertise in teaching mathematics. Yet how teachers' understanding of one content area is related to other content areas has not been investigated in depth. We explored this question by investigating teachers' knowledge of two theoretically related areas: (1)…

This paper reports an intervention study in the teaching of fraction concepts at a village school in Hong Kong. The classes consisted of 60 Grade three students with different cultural backgrounds, including African, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Nepalese, and Pakistani. The study represents one of the relatively few studies that investigate the…

Mental brackets constitute an idiosyncratic use of brackets sometimes used to evaluate arithmetic expressions and are closely connected with students' structure sense. The relevant literature describes the use of mental brackets focusing on primary school students and in the context of arithmetic. Using 181 high school students' solutions to seven…

Previous research has shown that students form fragmented understandings about variability even after instruction and that these primitive notions function as obstacles to a robust understanding of variability. To investigate the effect of disruptions to students' primitive notions of variability, we examined undergraduate students' reasoning…

External representations such as diagrams often appear in teachers' repertoire of pedagogical tools to support students' conceptual learning and problem-solving activities. The study of diagrams and diagrammatic representations has received growing interest from diverse disciplines. Diagrams remain a central feature of science, technology,…

A theoretical model describing young students' (Grade 3) arithmetic-algebraic structure sense was formulated and validated empirically (n = 130), hypothesizing that young students' arithmetic-algebraic structure sense consists of five distinct but correlated factors; structure in numerical equivalence and word-problem modeling, structure in…

This study examined a cohort of middle school pre-service mathematics teachers' understanding of the rate of change as they engaged in a model development sequence. By adopting a design-based research perspective, a model development sequence on the concept of rate of change has been designed and implemented as part of a mathematical modeling…

The literature has amply shown that primary and secondary school students have difficulties in understanding rational number size. Many of these difficulties are explained by the natural number bias or the use of other incorrect reasoning such as gap thinking. However, in many studies, these types of reasoning have been inferred from comparing…

Teachers' mathematical knowledge has important consequences for the quality of the learning environment they create for their students to learn mathematics. Yet relatively little is known about how teachers reason proportionally, despite the fact that proportional reasoning is foundational for several mathematics concepts and that ratios and…

From literature, we know that making the connections between mathematics and physics is not trivial for most students, even at the advanced level. In the specific context of partial derivatives in thermodynamics, research suggests that making explicit connections between the mathematics and the physics is necessary to foster student understanding.…

This paper examines prospective mathematics teachers' knowledge of asymptotes and asymptotic behaviour of functions in calculus. They are university students and future facilitators of knowledge in upper secondary education. We constructed a "reference epistemological model" to describe the knowledge about asymptotes for upper secondary…

It is important for students to develop a relational understanding of the equal sign, but students often have simultaneous operational and relational conceptions (i.e., SOR conceptions). This case study carefully explored how a student's conception of the equal sign changed during a classroom teaching experiment and analyzed the possibilities and…

We examined widely used popular calculus textbooks to explore opportunities to learn the limit concept. Definitions, worked problems, and exercise problems were coded to examine if these tasks allow students to use informal thinking to coordinate domain and range processes to understand the infinite process of limit. Results revealed many exercise…

The quality of curriculum resources and teaching practices can constrain or promote students' opportunities for mathematics learning, in particular, students with diverse language proficiency. The video study investigates 18 classes that all used the same curriculum resources aimed at developing 367 seventh graders' conceptual understanding of…

This study used fraction number line estimation tasks to evaluate students' developmental patterns, and the relationship of such tasks with whole number bias was explored. In total, 189 fourth-grade students in a northern Taiwan elementary school were followed over 2 years. The results demonstrated that the students' fraction learning development…