This study examines the theory of didactic situations in mathematics (TDS) and the theory of social interactionism (TSI), employing strategies from the networking of theories schema to uncover potential complementarities between them. These theories provide different a priori perspectives on mathematics classroom interaction: TDS focuses on the functioning of mathematical knowledge in adidactic situations, while TSI centers on the emergence of mathematical meanings through the interactive accomplishment of intersubjectivity. The study gives rise to a hypothesis concerning complementary dimensions of the theoretical frameworks, particularly regarding social interaction and related classroom regulations. This hypothesis is empirically substantiated through theoretical triangulation of a dataset from a mathematics classroom. The TDS analysis, considering the mathematical knowledge in question, identifies a Topaze effect within the dataset, whereas the TSI analysis construes the empirical facts as exhibiting a funnel pattern of interaction. It is argued that the interpretations mutually enhance each other’s explanatory power.

To engage with specialized subject content, students must develop adequate reading skills. In mathematics, this includes to integrate information from different semiotic resources. This study elucidates how differences in the structural connections between mathematical symbols and written language in mathematics texts can affect the reading process. With the help of eye-tracking techniques, we investigated differences in focus and navigation when 15-year-olds read task texts in two distinct designs: a traditional design with written language presented in lines and all connections based on semantics; and a design including a graphic emphasizing links between symbols and explanations. While the graphic design was found to facilitate fast interpretation of the symbol–language connections, the traditional design seemed to encourage global reading, involving more text parts. When designing texts for mathematics learning, structural connections may be chosen to adapt texts to various student groups and purposes.

In light of the growing interest in research examining problem posing, this study explores an under-researched aspect – group problem posing. It examines the role of problem situations and prompts, introduced within a problem posing intervention, on the nature of the problems posed by groups of pre-service elementary teachers for children in two 4th grade classes. The impact of the group on the problem posing process was also explored. The findings reveal improvements in the quality of the problems posed due to a number of factors including the use of textbook problems as initial problem situations that supported problem reformulation, the constructive role of prompts to focus attention on desirable problem features and the valuable role of feedback in determining problem aptness. A challenge when problem posing was difficulty coordinating attention to multiple problem features, however, this was mediated by the affordance of working in groups which served to share the responsibility for, and enhance, problem quality alongside the use of the F-PosE problem posing framework which focused attention on desirable problem features.

In this study we address two issues related to problem-posing tasks in teacher education: (i) the characterization of the specialized knowledge mobilized by prospective teachers when carrying out these tasks and (ii) the identification of the prospective teachers’ pedagogical intentions in making adaptations to textbook problems. We asked prospective teachers to outline their suggestions for transforming a multiplicative problem so as to “promote the understanding” of their potential pupils. We then carried out a content analysis of their responses using the Mathematics Teachers’ Specialized Knowledge model of teachers’ specialized knowledge and identified their pedagogical intentions by means of the constant comparison method. The results show that prospective primary teachers mobilized both mathematical and pedagogical content knowledge in their responses to the problem reformulation task. Further, four distinct pedagogical intentions emerged that drew on different interpretations of the task prompt, and this influenced the type of transformation the prospective primary teachers suggested and the knowledge they mobilized in their answers.

Children are highly inclined to attend to the properties of numbers, operations and equality when given helpful tools for doing so. Our aim was to investigate early algebraic thinking with the compensation property of equality for subtraction. We provided 22 (9–11-year-old) students with physical blocks for building vertical towers and conducted individual interviews with them as they completed a sequence of 15 tasks involving subtraction as difference using concrete, numeric, and symbolic representations. Relational thinking was evidenced across a range of subtraction calculation skill levels. Those students who could use both indirect addition and take-away strategies flexibly, depending on the size of the numbers involved, were more likely to evidence attention to generality with symbolic equations. The shift to symbolic equations elicited some students’ productive attempts to connect subtraction as difference and subtraction as take way but seemed to hinder others by provoking a return to take away calculations rather than relational thinking strategies.