Results of the last thirty years in mathematics education have shown the importance of an operational concept development. One of the geometrical concepts that has been researched for years already, however, not with the particular focus on its systematic teaching in school mathematics, is the concept of angle. In this paper we focus on children's…

In this study we explored to what extent middle school teachers were able to appropriately identify proportional situations when presented with various mathematical structures and if there were relationships between attributes of the teachers and their ability to identify proportional situations. Interestingly, there were no strong relationships…

A common area of difficulty and frustration for low achieving students is the operations involving negative numbers. The main objective of our innovations in this area with two classes of Year 7 low achieving students was to develop positive feelings towards mathematics, in particular of an appreciation for the "reasonableness" and clear…

This study investigated how to improve the teaching of problem solving in a large Melbourne secondary school. Coaching was used to support and equip five teachers, some with limited experiences in teaching problem solving, with knowledge and strategies to build up students' problem solving and reasoning skills. The results showed increased…

This article develops three different types of student explanations and studies how teachers respond to these. The data come from five classrooms at upper grade 5-7 (ages from eleven to thirteen) where all mathematics teaching for one week was filmed. These films were transcribed and student explanations identified. Through a close inspection of…

Interactions between teachers and students contribute to the quality of the classroom setting and growing evidence that the affective undertone of these interactions matters when considering outcomes for both the students and the teachers they serve. Although numerous measures of teacher-student interactions exist, relying on self-report or…

Building upon the work of Zieffler, Garfield, DelMas and Reading (2008) and others, we developed a framework for assessing informal inferential tasks in middle school mathematics textbooks. The framework both embodies the key recommendations for developing informal inferential reasoning and captures common trimming attributes, which lower the…

We detail a learning progressions approach to early algebra research and how existing work around learning progressions and trajectories in mathematics and science education has informed our development of a four-component theoretical framework consisting of: a curricular progression of learning goals across big algebraic ideas; an instructional…

We introduce a cognitive framework for measuring reading comprehension that includes the use of novel summary-writing tasks. We derive NLP features from the holistic rubric used to score the summaries written by students for such tasks and use them to design a preliminary, automated scoring system. Our results show that the automated approach…

This study examines teachers' initial conceptions of an integrated STEM-PBL approach and their perceptions of what facilitates or hinders implementation in their schools. This study took place within the first year of a three-year STEM Professional Development (PD) program for middle school math, science and English language arts teachers. The two…

Research in learning technologies has often focused on the affordances of single technologies such as pcs, smartphones or interactive whiteboards. However, in most learning environments technologies do not stand alone but are embedded in activity structures and webs of materials that make up the learning activity. This is specifically relevant…

Poor mathematics achievement in middle school students is evident in many countries. While some of the difficulties can be attributed to student related factors, there is considerable evidence that computational automaticity is essential for mathematics achievement. A QuickSmart (QS) mathematics intervention program was trialled with a group of…

Much of the literature surrounding the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems has focused on the type of feedback students receive. Current research suggests that the timing of feedback also plays a role in improved learning. Some researchers have shown that delaying feedback might lead to a "desirable difficulty", where students'…

As the disparity between educational standards and reality outside educational institutions is increasing, alternative learning infrastructure such as mobile technologies are becoming more common, and are challenging long held, traditional modes of teaching. Educators' attitudes toward wireless devices are mixed. Wireless devices are perceived by…

The field of learning analytics is rapidly developing techniques for using data captured during online learning. In this article, we develop an additional application: the use of analytics for improving implementation fidelity in a randomized controlled efficacy trial. In an efficacy trial, the goal is to determine whether an innovation has a…