Finland and Singapore are both nations that have excelled in mathematics on international assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Evidence of Finland's educational success emerged with the outcome of the first PISA study in 2000. Since…

Nearly four years after a front-page story in "The New York Times" sparked a fierce debate by suggesting that charter school students nationally were lagging academically behind their peers in regular public schools, the national testing program that informed the controversy has generated far more data for researchers and advocates to scrutinize.…

David Schwartz's classic book "How Much Is a Million?" can be the catalyst for sparking many interesting mathematical investigations. This article describes five episodes in which children in grades 2-5 all heard this familiar story read aloud to them. At each grade level, they were encouraged to think of their own way to explore the concept of…

Big things come in small packages. This saying came to the mind of the author after he created a simple math review activity for his fourth grade students. Though simple, it has proven to be extremely advantageous in reinforcing math concepts. He uses this activity, which he calls "Show What You Know," often. This activity provides the perfect…

The benefits of multisensory instruction for teaching mathematics to students in resource rooms were explored. Participants were third and fourth graders (n = 12) in 3 resource rooms for replacement mathematics in a middle-class school district in New Jersey. The students received weekly instruction for several months, using manipulatives and word…

Language and education are interrelated because all teaching is given through the medium of language. Language is considered to be both a precondition for thought and a bearer of thought and therefore influences the extent to which a child's intelligence is actualised. In the South African context linguistic diversity is a complex issue. It has…

This article describes a teacher and class as they discover that their reading comprehension strategies cross over into mathematical problem solving. The students practice using visualization techniques to improve their understanding of word problems. (Contains 5 figures.)

This study was designed to compare the effects of Team Assisted Individualization (TAI) and Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) on fourth grade students' academic achievement in and attitudes towards mathematics. Seven classes of a school were randomly selected for this experimental study. Two of these were given instruction through TAI;…

Dividing by zero can be confusing for students at all levels. If teachers are to provide clear and understandable explanations of this topic, they must possess a strong conceptual understanding of it themselves. In this article, the authors present qualitative data on fourth- through eighth-grade teachers' perceptions of division by zero. They…

This study implemented a three-stage problem-based estimation instruction scenario and combined it with mobile technology to provide elementary teachers with an effective e-tool for observing student estimation and leading effective class or group discussions on the selection and assessment of appropriate strategies for solving daily estimation…

Useful for small groups or one-on-one instruction, this book offers successful math interventions and response to intervention (RTI) connections. Teachers will learn to target math instruction to struggling students by: (1) Diagnosing weaknesses; (2) Providing specific, differentiated instruction; (3) Using formative assessments; (4) Offering…

Learning mathematics has traditionally been thought of as a sequential progression. Children learn to count to 10, then to 20, and then to 100. They learn to add without regrouping and then with regrouping. The authors teach addition before multiplication and the two-times table before the six-times table. They usually teach division as a separate…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…

This textbook is a fourth-grade course in arithmetic. It contains a review of the principles taught in Book III, with their extension to problems of greater difficulty. A few new principles are introduced from time to time, the aim being to introduce the new thought side by side with the review of those already taught. Realizing that the highest…

The special learning needs of students in grades 4-5 who are children of poverty have been misunderstood and therefore unaddressed. As a result, many students born into poverty start down a slippery slope of steady academic decline in grades 4 and 5. But specialized, counter-intuitive approaches. Specifically, accelerating the learning of these…