• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.155-173
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to offer the implication for elementary school mathematics teaching by analyzing teachers' reflection on the cognitive demands of mathematical tasks they give in class. During the setup phase and the implementation phase in math class, the researchers analyzed the change of cognitive demands on mathematical tasks and the factors which had influence on such changes. After teachers' reflection on teaching, the researchers analyzed the change of cognitive demands on mathematical tasks and the factors which had influence on such changes in math classes. As a result, before teachers' reflection on the cognitive demands of mathematical tasks, the higher-level demands of mathematical tasks had a tendency to decline. However, after teachers' reflection on the cognitive demands of mathematical tasks, higher-level demands of mathematical tasks were maintained.

• School Mathematics
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.485-500
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to investigate how elementary mathematics teachers use and implement a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum material, Everyday Mathematics, and to examine what features the curriculum material has. Eight elementary mathematics teachers in the United States participated in the study. Data sources consist of teacher classroom observation write-ups, interviews, and the curriculum material. The results from the analysis of the curriculum material suggest that 80 percent of the tasks are at the high-level in terms of cognitive demand and 26 percent of tasks are identified as transparent. The results also show that the teachers appeared to adapt the curriculum material and partially take suggestions or activities out of the curriculum material in enacting them in their mathematics classrooms. The analysis of enacted tasks suggests that the levels of cognitive demand were shifted from high-level to low-level; 27 percent of the high-level tasks in the curriculum material were maintained at the high-level as enacted in the mathematics classrooms. The level of cognitive demand shifted in many cases; shifts from high-level to low-level occurred. This contributes to the curriculum material not being transparent to teachers.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.31-42
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to explore how elementary mathematics teachers' adaptations of a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum material in the USA, Everyday Mathematics, influence elementary students' opportunities to learn mathematics. I illustrate how elementary mathematics teachers alter the curriculum material and how such alterations influence their students' opportunities to learn mathematics in their mathematics classrooms. Results suggest that the teachers with Everyday Mathematics did not appear to maintain the cognitive demand of mathematical tasks as appeared in the curriculum material, as set up by the teacher, and as enacted in the classrooms. The results also show that the teachers seemed to omit components including important tasks and suggestions in the curriculum material. As a consequence, the students did not have an opportunity to think and understand mathematics conceptually and meaningfully; they were exposed and encouraged to learn mathematics procedurally.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.309-327
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• 2018

This study is a case study of an elementary school teacher's reflection and practice in the process of planning, executing and criticizing his lesson on division with decimals. The purpose of this study was to clarify what kinds of problems an elementary school teacher was thinking about and how his focus was changing in the process of planning and executing a lesson and criticizing his lesson with his peers. The teacher was set in three periods: a teacher planning a lesson, a teacher executing a lesson, and a teacher criticizing his or her own lesson. Each period was analyzed in eight aspects: Establishing the goals for mathematics, implementing tasks, connecting mathematical representations, facilitating mathematical discourse, posing questions, building procedural fluency from conceptual understanding, supporting productive struggles, and using evidences of students' thinking.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.77-110
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• 2007

This study attempted to investigate how to students show high-level mathematical thinking in math classes. This paper describes how to setup the task for lead to a high - level of thinking out students and what efforts are required while a teacher tried to maintaining students's high-level cognition during the tasks implemented. The researcher as teacher analyzed the tasks of length measurement unit in 2-Ga elementary math textbooks, modified and created math tasks demanded students' high-level cognition, made instruction plans, and implemented those tasks maintaining the levels of cognitive demand of tasks. After that, the researcher reflected and analyzed the levels of cognitive demand of tasks of instruction and factors that cause to change intended high-level cognitive demand. After reflection, second roof of action research was conducted to 2-Na length measurement unit. This paper includes those results and reflections of practitioner.

• School Mathematics
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.409-444
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• 2014

There have been many discussions of teaching and learning mathematics through modeling activities in mathematics education research community. Although there has been some agreement regarding modeling activity as an alternative way to support mathematics teaching and learning, there is still no clear consensus on these issues. This paper reports a case study which aims to identify ways to design modeling tasks and instruction to foster meta-level learning, and investigate how modeling activities can facilitate meta-level learning. From the results of teaching experiment, this study examines the potential of modeling activities in mathematics teaching and learning.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.62 no.1
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• pp.57-78
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• 2023

Students' engagement in lessons not only determines the direction and result of the lessons, but also affects academic achievement and continuity of follow-up learning. In order to provide implications related to teaching strategies for encouraging students' engagement in elementary mathematics lessons, this study implemented lessons for middle-low achieving fifth graders using open-ended tasks and analyzed characteristics of students' engagement in the light of the framework descripors developed based on previous research. As a result of the analysis, the students showed behavioral engagement in voluntarily answering teacher's questions or enduring difficulties and performing tasks until the end, emotional engagement in actively expressing their pleasure by clapping, standing up and the feelings with regard to the topics of lessons and the tasks, cognitive engagement in using real-life examples or their prior knowledge to solve the tasks, and social engagement in helping friends, telling their ideas to others and asking for friends' opinions to create collaborative ideas. This result suggested that lessons using open-ended tasks could encourage elementary students' engagement. In addition, this research presented the potential significance of teacher's support and positive feedback to students' responses, teaching methods of group activities and discussions, strategies of presenting tasks such as the board game while implementing the lessons using open-ended tasks.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.62 no.2
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• pp.211-236
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• 2023

The purpose of this study is to derive implications of preservice mathematics teacher education in Korea by analyzing the case of edTPA used in the preservice teacher training process in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing interest in promoting professional competencies considering not only the cognitive dimension related to knowledge development of preservice mathematics teachers but also the situational dimension considering reality in the classroom. The edTPA in the United States is a performance-based assessment based on lessons conducted by preservice teachers at school. This study analyzes the professional competencies required of preservice mathematics teachers by analyzing handbooks that described the case of edTPA in which preservice mathematics teachers in the United States participate. The edTPA includes planning, instruction, and assessment tasks, and continuous tasks are performed in connection with classes. Thus, the analysis is conducted on the points of linkage between the description of evaluation items and criteria in the planning, instruction, and assessment tasks, as well as the professional competencies required from that linkage. As a result of analyzing the edTPA handbooks, the professional competencies required of preservice mathematics teachers in the edTPA assessment were the competency to focus on and implement specific mathematics lessons, the competency to reflectively understand the implementation and assessment of specific mathematics lessons, and the competency to make a progressive determination of students' achievement related to their learning and their uses of language and representations. The results of this analysis can be used as constructs for competencies that can be assessed in the preservice in the organization of the preservice mathematics teacher curriculum and practice training semester system in Korea.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.675-690
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• 2015

This study explore the features of mathematical tasks as an effective means to foster pre-service primary teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and develop mathematical task for pre-service primary teachers. As a result, prospective teachers have while solving a mathematical task, converting a given situation to a mathematical problem, and solve problems through connections with existing knowledge, and experience seeing the existing mathematical concepts from a new perspective. Finally, we discussed the conditions for a suitable mathematical task in teacher education.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.433-457
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• 2022

An effective teacher community helps the participating teachers improve their instructional quality. This study reports a teacher community consisting of 15 elementary school teachers and one teacher educator. This paper analyzed 15 mathematics lessons in which the teachers implemented the five practices for orchestrating productive mathematics discussions by Smith and Stein (2018) based on the grade-specific discussions as well as the whole community's discussions. The results of this study showed that the overall levels of each practice either increased gradually or maintained at the highest Level 4, as mathematics lessons had been implemented. Specifically, the following practices were quite successful: setting goals for a lesson, selecting an appropriate task, anticipating student responses, and selecting student solutions. However, both sequencing and connecting student solutions were implemented at various levels. Monitoring student work tended to remain at Level 2 which included incorrect implementation of the practice. This paper closes with implications related to the skillful implementation of the five practices through a teacher community.