A Title I elementary school in New York City faced a challenge in supporting students in Grade 3 to Grade 5 who did not meet state proficiency standards in mathematics. The student body of approximately 300 was 80% Black and Brown students, with 40% of students identified as English language learners or students with disabilities. The assistant…

The "Connecting With Others" curriculum for grades 3 through 5 will help students learn to be sensitive to differences, resolve conflicts without resorting to violence, and learn tolerance and acceptance of others. Includes 30 lessons divided into five skill areas: Concept of Self and Others, Socialization, Problem Solving and Conflict…

The purpose of this study was to understand cultural differences and similarities in children's creative characteristics in Korea and Australia. In this cross-cultural research, the Integrative Creativity Test (K-ICT, [13]) with identified validity and reliability for measuring elementary school students' creative ability and creative personality,…

This study addressed predictors of the development of word problem solving (WPS) across the intermediate grades. At beginning of 3rd grade, 4 cohorts of students (N = 261) were measured on computation, language, nonverbal reasoning skills, and attentive behavior and were assessed 4 times from beginning of 3rd through end of 5th grade on 2 measures…

Explores changes in students' probabilistic thinking and writing during an instructional program that emphasized transactional writing in a problem-solving context. Finds no significant correlations between probabilistic thinking and writing levels--students made gains in both probability reasoning and writing. Reveals their writing incorporated…

Investigates the extent to which children's number sense and novel problem-solving skills govern their problem-posing abilities in routine and nonroutine situations. Children who participated in the program appeared to show substantial developments in each of the program components in contrast to those who did not participate. Contains 66…

Describes a fifth-grade student solving the "Food for Thought" problem featured in the February 1998 issue. (ASK)

Develops and tests a learning environment for teaching and learning how to model and solve mathematical application problems using four classes of fifth graders. Indicates that the intervention had a positive effect on different aspects of pupils' mathematical modeling and problem solving abilities. (Contains 62 references.) (Author/ASK)

In the Hypothesis-Experiment-Instruction (HEI) method students are presented with a problem with three or four answer alternatives, which leads them later to recognize the distribution of choices, discuss a variety of ideas among them, and integrate distributed pieces of information. This study examined the effects of presenting a problem with or…

Fifth grade children's (n=16) understandings of simple fractions such as 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 were investigated. The study identified three alternative conceptions of fractions: (1) 1/"N" is one of "N equal" parts, (2) 1/N is one of "N equal" parts, and (3) parts must fit together to form the whole. In addition, many…

Concludes that children scoring high in picture arrangement on the Wechsler have significantly poorer problem solving ability than children with low picture arrangement scores. (RB)

Shares a problem-solving activity in which the aim is to find out how fifth-grade students would approach a nontraditional problem in which several conditions had to be met. Asks teachers to consider student observations in their teaching. (ASK)

Age-related changes in children's performance on simple division problems (e.g., 6 divided by 2, 72 divided by 9) were investigated by asking children in Grades 4 through 7 to solve 32 simple division problems. Differences in performance were found across grade, with younger children performing more slowly and less accurately than older children.…

This study focused on analyzing children's difficulties with two-step mathematical word problems. Seventy-one fifth-grade children in Puerto Rico were individually observed solving five problems. Two of these were two-step problems; the remaining three were one-step problems with the same mathematical structures as the components of the two-step…

Sixty fifth-grade students were randomly assigned to a group to be trained in solving Inhelder and Piaget's pendulum problem by Siegler's method or to a control group. A significant training effect was found. A weak transfer effect was found, but delayed performance showed no training effect. (Author/BW)