This paper focuses on examining the influence of parents' involvement in class on the students' performance in math, the way parents get involved with the school, and their effects on the pupil's success. The study attempts to identify a number of aspects that influence parents' involvement or uninvolvement in education and factors that impact…

Gender differences in mathematics learning outcomes are still evident in many countries participating in large scale international testing, as well as in national testing in Israel, the context in which the study reported here was conducted. The participants were 281 students from three Israeli elementary schools and were in grades 4 and 6. The…

This study explores effects of teaching experience and specialized mathematics education on mathematics anxiety and mathematics teaching anxiety. Fifty-nine female pre-service and in-service mathematics primary school teachers with varied specialized mathematics education and teaching experience responded to a questionnaire measuring mathematics…

The aim of this study was to explore the beliefs of elementary school students about mathematics and about themselves as mathematics learners. The participants, Israeli grade 4 and grade 6 students, completed questionnaires. Using an "animal metaphor" to tap beliefs, some students perceived mathematics as difficult and complicated, while…

Mathematical problem solving is one of the most valuable aspects of mathematics education. It is also the most difficult for elementary-school students (Verschaffel, Greer, & De Corte, 2000). Students experience cognitive and metacognitive difficulties in this area and develop negative emotions and poor motivation, which hamper their efforts…

One of the key courses in the mathematics teacher education program in Israel is arithmetic, which engages in contents which these pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) will later teach at school. Teaching arithmetic involves knowledge about the essence of the concept of "number" and the development thereof, calculation methods and…

This case study examines the effect of coteaching on the development of a student's professional knowledge. The study analyzes the student's perceptions of her experiences in a yearlong seminar course of math teaching in elementary school, conducted at a teachers college in Israel. The course was interdisciplinary and taught jointly by two…

This study combines theories related to collective learning and theories related to mathematical creativity to investigate the notion of collective mathematical creativity in elementary school classrooms. Collective learning takes place when mathematical ideas and actions, initially stemming from an individual, are built upon and reworked,…

To what extent can instructional design be based on principles for instilling a culture of problem solving and conceptual learning? This is the main focus of the study described in this paper, in which third grade students participated in a one-year course designed to foster problem solving and mathematical reasoning. The design relied on five…

The present study aimed to explore the contribution of a mathematics in-service training course to elementary school teachers (1st-6th grades) in Israel. The study was conducted among 449 educators. They were required to respond to background questions. Moreover, they were asked to indicate their expectations from the in-service training course…

The current study examined the development of two effects that have been found in single-digit multiplication errors: relatedness and distance. Typically achieving (TA) second, fourth, and sixth graders and adults, and sixth and eighth graders with a mathematics learning disability (MLD) performed a verification task. Relatedness was defined by a…

The article aims to check the way adults, "some who are" practicing mathematics teachers at elementary school, "some who are" academicians making a career change to mathematics teachers at junior high school and the "rest who are" pre-service mathematics teachers at elementary school, cope with the solution of…

The present paper engages in a qualitative research of self-assessment of two lecturers and their students within the framework of a mathematics teaching seminar course (a course during which students submit a research final work) at a teachers' training college in Israel. Two lecturers co-teach in the course - one of them in the discipline of…

Explanations are considered to be key aids to understanding the study of mathematics, science, and other complex disciplines. This paper discusses the role of students' explanations in making sense of data and learning to reason informally about statistical inference. We closely follow students' explanations in which they utilize their experiences…

This study focuses on the knowledge exhibited by 30 elementary school in-service and pre-service teachers in solving non-routine mathematical problems and on their beliefs regarding these kinds of problems. Interviews were used to reveal teachers' knowledge and beliefs. The findings indicated that these teachers had difficulty in solving…