In educational settings, reflective thinking is often overlooked, with an excessive emphasis on final answers, resulting in students needing more ability to evaluate and reconstruct their problem-solving processes. The ability for reflective thinking is required by students in solving problems, including numerical problems. This study uses a…

Using question 28 from the May Problems to Ponder in volume 114, the author and her seventh- and eighth-grade students launched into a discussion of creativity, linearity, piecewise, and recursive definitions of functions. This pattern to ponder provided rich mathematical opportunities for all students in her middle school classroom.

Mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs) need opportunities to learn best practices in teaching mathematics, e.g., productive struggle. Productive struggle happens when students work through challenging problems that are not straightforward. This paper describes mathematics PSTs' engagement with productive struggle in a mathematics methods course.…

This study aims to reveal the mathematical reasoning process of 8th-grade students and the reasoning indicators they use in this process. The study was carried out in line with the data obtained from the Mathematical Reasoning Test (MRT) administered to 292 8th-grade students. The mathematical reasoning performances of the participants were…

Effective teaching requires enjoyable classroom tasks aimed at promoting students' learning of mathematics meaningfully, and previous research has demonstrated that the use of origami activities in mathematics classrooms can help achieve that goal. In this article, the authors describe their "LOVE MATH" one-straight-cut letter origami…

The problem addressed by this study is that students are not implementing literacy strategies they learned in English language Art classes in their mathematics classes. The study's purpose is to explore how seventh-grade students utilize literacy strategies modeled by teacher/s in the mathematics classroom and implementation to deconstruct and…

Uncertainties are inherent in education as learners encounter gaps in their awareness of topics, receive new information that potentially conflicts with prior understandings, and grapple with known unknowns in order to construct new knowledge. While researchers have shown that students productively struggling with problematized and uncertain…

Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

Though there is an extensive research literature on understanding and assessing individual modeling competencies, less attention has been given to characterizing the social context of the classroom in which modeling occurs. Yet a classroom's culture of modeling--its negotiated system of beliefs and values about the nature of modeling and what…

This study investigated what 12 prospective mathematics teachers (PTs) in a middle school mathematics method course reported during a video-stimulated recall interview about their experiences when they were engaged in a doing math task that yielded an Opportunity for Productive Struggle (OPS). We investigated their reported feelings during the…

When one sets out to solve a mathematics problem, a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment comes with finding the answer and knowing it is correct. In contrast, a student performing the correct process to solve an algebra equation and getting an answer such as 3 = 0 may be left perplexed and not understanding what--if anything--he or she did…

The issue of low math performance, particularly in schools serving historically marginalized communities, requires immediate attention. Despite implementing various interventions, including leadership changes, curriculum updates, and hiring consultants, student achievement in math has remained stagnant at Ida B. Wells Academy (Wells). This case…

This study investigated the methods that pre-service teachers employed while finding volume using integration and the reasons why they utilized these methods (problems); the accuracy of their solutions was also analyzed in this study. Case study design, a qualitative research method, was used for this study. 45 sophomore pre-service teachers…

The ability to solve mathematical problems has been an interesting research topic for several decades. Intuition is considered a part of higher-level thinking that can help improve mathematical problem-solving abilities. Although many studies have been conducted on mathematical problem-solving, research on intuition as a bridge in mathematical…

The beginning of the school year is a time of intense work for students and teachers, especially if it means learning mathematics in new ways (Ruef 2016). Students need guidance and support if they are shifting beliefs about what it means to do mathematics. This article shows how Torres and her students co-created new ways to be good at…