There has been considerable research into how children solve single-digit addition problems for more than a century now, which has brought about significant changes to the ways teachers' support children to retrieve single-digit addition facts. In this project, we examine what makes an addition problem difficult to retrieve in light of…

The shift from additive to multiplicative thinking is challenging for students. A professional learning program was developed that focused on an identified area of need by teachers, namely multiplicative thinking. Program content focused on concepts underpinning multiplicative thinking, pedagogical approaches, challenging tasks, and application to…

The current study explored the reasons for students' preferences for the teach-first and task-first lesson structures, and whether students' preferences were influenced by their perceptions of the teacher's preference. Students (n=18) from two composite Year 3 and 4 classes (aged 8-10 years) completed a post-lesson drawing task and participated in…

Providing opportunities for students to demonstrate their mathematical thinking can be challenging. This paper reports on a case study conducted with a teacher and her class of Grade 3/4 students which investigated this phenomenon. Following collection of baseline data that showed her students were not demonstrating evidence of mathematical…

There is strong evidence from research conducted in the United States that fraction magnitude understanding supports mathematics achievement. Unfortunately, there has been little research that examines if this relation is present across educational contexts with different approaches to teaching fractions. The current study compared fourth and…

This case study aims to describe the learning characteristics of a child and evaluate his preferences for using physical manipulatives (PM) and virtual manipulatives (VM) to solve fraction problems. The participant in this study was a fourth-grade child. The child was given similar problems to solve using PM and VM. Data sources were observations…

Making connections within and between different aspects of mathematics is recognised as fundamental to learning mathematics with understanding. However, exactly what these connections are and how they serve the goal of learning mathematics is rarely made explicit in curriculum documents with the result that mathematics tends to be presented as a…

This article illustrates a learning sequence from the Interdisciplinary Mathematics and Science (IMS) Learning project, connecting science and mathematics learning in the primary school. Exploring light and its properties involved a series of investigations conducted in Grades 4 and 5 across three classes in two schools in regional Victoria. The…

As a multifaceted concept, the learning of angle concepts takes years to achieve and is beset with challenges. This paper explores how the processes of constructing and validating a learning progression in geometric reasoning can be used to generate targeted teaching advice to support the learning of angle concept. Data from 1090 Year 4 to Year 10…

This collaborative inquiry between an academic (James Russo) and two school-based practitioners (Jessie McCosh and Travis Hewish) explores student attitudes towards learning mathematics through problem solving in a medium sized primary school in regional Victoria.

Before school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the frequency with which teachers used computer activities to teach a class varied across education systems. However, many teachers across the board reported the need for professional development to teach using technical devices. Using results from TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and…

Increasingly, learning in science and mathematics is considered in terms of induction into the multimodal language practices of the disciplinary community. A strong strand of research in this tradition has involved students being challenged to invent multimodal language forms, and their ideas refined through structured guidance. Often, however,…

Mathematics educators and researchers have advocated for the use of manipulatives to teach mathematics for decades. The purpose of this article is to provide illustrative uses of a readily available manipulative rather than a complete list. From an Australian perspective, Pop-it fidget toys can be used across the mathematics curriculum. This paper…

In this article the authors provide an overview of the Interdisciplinary Mathematics and Science project conducted in Grades 1 to 6 in four Australian schools. The project teachers implemented an enquiry-based pedagogical model through 12 interrelated topics. This paper details how a range of mathematics and science concepts can be effectively…

This study reports on the capabilities of 53 Year 4 students as they completed the final stages of their first complete statistical investigation. In the context of becoming acquainted with students in a sister school in another city, students in both schools wrote and refined questions, which were answered by all students in an on-line survey.…