Reports on a study that examined the effect upon ninth grade students' comprehension of mathematics materials rewritten on the basis of the students' oral language in order to isolate those linguistic features that appeared to facilitate or interfere with comprehension. (FL)

Summarizes key findings of an evaluation of the newly developed TLE program (The Learning Equation), implemented in Alberta and British Columbia (Canada). TLE comprises computer-based math resources designed to improve retention of expected math outcomes in secondary school students. Teacher evaluation and math achievement scores of 1,184 students…

Reports on the strategies adopted by a group of teachers in Ontario, Canada as they implemented de-streaming with grade 9 classes. Indicates that teachers were found to be making special provisions for both low- and high-achieving students and employing a wide range of techniques for assessing student progress. (Contains 20 references.)…

High school students normally encounter the study and use of formal proof in the context of Euclidean geometry. Professional mathematicians typically use an informal trial-and-error approach to a problem, guided by intuition, to arrive at the truth of an idea. Formal proof is pursued only after mathematicians are intuitively convinced about the…

In the present article, we argue that the conceptual change approach to learning can apply in the case of mathematics, taking into consideration the particular nature of mathematical knowledge and the neurobiological bases of mathematical cognition. In the empirical study that is reported in this article, we investigated ninth graders'…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the impact of writing during mathematical problem solving. The study involved an analysis of ninth grade algebra students' written and verbal descriptions of their mathematical problem solving processes. Through this comparison, a better understanding of the connection between problem…

Two hundred and thirty-one students in six Grade 9 classes in two government secondary schools located near Chiang Mai, Thailand, attempted to solve the same 18 quadratic equations before and after participating in 11 lessons on quadratic equations. Data from the students' written responses to the equations, together with data in the form of…

Two individually-adaptive mathematics courses for urban high school youth were developed by a Commonwealth CAI Consortium to help satisfy the ninth grade requirement for general mathematics and algebra in Pennsylvania. A description of the courses and of the computer system, and an analysis of the effectiveness of the CAI-mediated mathematics…

A SEQUENTIAL MATHEMATICS PROGRAM BEGINNING WITH THE BASIC FUNDAMENTALS ON THE FOURTH GRADE LEVEL IS PRESENTED. INCLUDED ARE AN UNDERSTANDING OF OUR NUMBER SYSTEM, AND THE BASIC OPERATIONS OF WORKING WITH WHOLE NUMBERS--ADDITION, SUBTRACTION, MULTIPLICATION, AND DIVISION. COMMON FRACTIONS ARE TAUGHT IN THE FIFTH, SIXTH, AND SEVENTH GRADES. A…

NEW INTELLECTUAL APTITUDES WERE INVESTIGATED TO DETERMINE TO WHAT EXTENT THEY INFLUENCE ACHIEVEMENT IN NINTH-GRADE ALGEBRA AND GENERAL MATHEMATICS COURSES. TESTS AND CRITERIA WERE COMPLETED FOR APPROXIMATELY 400 STUDENTS IN THE NINTH GRADE. THEY WERE ENROLLED IN ONE OF FOUR MATHEMATICS COURSES AND ADMINISTERED ACHIEVEMENT EXAMINATIONS UPON…

A police officer presented a question about a formula on speeding. This application was a good real-world example of radicals to present in an algebra class. How it was used is presented. (MNS)

Shares a coded version of the number line to provide concrete experiences for learning abstract concepts. Using the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, appropriate coded symbols are determined for the prime factorization of each natural number and used to study the concepts of greatest common divisor, least common multiple, square roots, and…

Three issues about students' reasoning, proving and understanding proof in number patterns are investigated in this paper. The first is to elaborate the features of junior high students' reasoning on linear and quadratic number patterns. The second is to study the relationships between 9th graders' justification of mathematical statements about…

"University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) Algebra," designed to increase students' skills in algebra, is appropriate for students in grades 7-10, depending on the students' incoming knowledge. This one-year course highlights applications, uses statistics and geometry to develop the algebra of linear equations and…

This issue of the newsletter describes the five Soloworks Laboratories which are being developed in conjunction with Project Solo. These are: 1) The Computer Laboratory, focusing on those aspects of mathematics which are well described by algorithms and which encourage student access to a local computer and terminals; 2) the Dynamics Laboratory,…