The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of the manipulatives in instruction of mathematics to those who have learning disabilities. Two middle school students who revealed very low achievements in the previous mathematics tests were involved in this study. Unit Cubes were used as the manipulatives, and the researchers utilized this manipulatives to teach the number bases. After a series of instructions utilizing the Unit Cubes, the subjects were interviewed with semi-structured form. In general, the effect of using the manipulatives were positive. Both subjects could understand much better with the Unit Cubes, and revealed affirmative results such as their positive attitudes toward mathematics.

In pthis aper, mathematical terms in 7th elementary mathematics curriculum(from now, in short, 7th curriculum)are reexamined critically. In 7th curriculum there are 123 terms, which seems to be selected cautiously But it is not sure. There are lots of evidences for selecting terms incautiously, Through these evidences, following conclusions are induced: (1) Terms were not selected strictly. There are many terms omitted in 7th curriculum, which are necessary for understanding mathematical concepts. (2) There were no rational principles for selecting terms in 7th curriculum. Any rational principles can not be found out among terms in 7th curriculum. (3) Mathematical terms and real life terms in 7th curriculum were not distinguished explicitly. There were some real life terms in 7th curriculum, which were significant for understanding mathematical concepts. But other real life terms which is significant also for understanding mathematical concepts were not contained in 7th curriculum.

In this information-oriented society of the 21st century, our education should combine the knowledge from the past and present in order to have students be ready to solve “the problems in the future”. But nowadays, our social situation makes much importance of the “cramming” education just for the College Scholastic Ability Test rather than the “whole man” education for making creative citizens of the future society. So does mathematics education. In a high school, mathematics education should be toward these aims: recognizing the value of math, applying mathematical principles to actual lives, promoting students' thinking ability. Also, it should focus on teaching higher level of mathematical knowledge which includes more logical and abstract idea so that students can prepare for the global society of the future. This study is about development and utilization of the teaching materials for mathematics class which usually deviates from the routine right after the Scholastic Ability Test finished. These materials are the result of a complete survey of the 3rd graders and their teachers and designed to use for 30 periods of class from after-the-test-finished to graduation. The materials consist of a history of mathematics, puzzles, magic number squares, and so on. Remarkably different from the current textbooks which deal with sets, equations, functions, these materials proved to be useful for their variety and attraction. Consequently, the materials are considered to keep the 3rd graders from forgetting mathematics even after the Scholastic Ability Test, and to help them recognize that mathematics is a kind of basic and cultural study and a tool of daily lives.

The aim of this study is to examine the number concept of middle school student at grade 9. The research problems of this study are "Can the students classify the various number correctly\ulcorner", "How do the students understand the proposition related to the number concept\ulcorner", and "How do the students know the definition of rational number, irrational number, and real number\ulcorner". In order to examine these problems, we analyze the students' responses about the questions related to the number concept. The result of this examination is that the number concept of students is very insufficient and lacking.

As a measure of the center of data, arithmetical mean, median, mode, harmonic mean and geometric mean are generally used. Students must learn qualitative aspect of average values as well as its calculation for its adequate use. As the result of the learning, they should be able to select the appropriate average value according to the characteristic of data and problem context. For this object, the historical origin and visual interpretation of average values were introduced in this paper. And to help teaching several meanings of average values, several examples including context were suggested.

Until now, There have been few studies to investigate a degree of abilities or interesting about mathematical problem-posing of first and second grades in elementary school. This is due to the fact that this students(1st and 2nd grades) have a limited amount of study time and their minds are not fully developed, and are lacking in their representation of ability to use the national language. This being the case, it is difficult to investigate their Mathematical problem-posing in a practical manner. However, our 7th elementary school Mathematics curriculum emphasizes the teaching and learning of Mathematical problem-posing from a basic level of first and second grade with emphasis on activity in teaming Mathematics. Through this study, having analysed the problems those children posed, I have found out they improved in numbers and correctness of their posed problems. And I too could found out showing to their much interesting and confidence to mathematical problem-posing and could confirmed for the children to admit themselves its merits through analyzing some questions to ask their opinions to it. I expect that this study can help to develop the teaching and learning materials for mathematical problem-posing and also to improve its methods of elementary school mathematics. The next study task is, I think, that it is necessary to accumulate the studies to investigate and analyse the practical learning activities of children for problem-posing contents of mathematics text books.

The study aims to develop balanced performance assessment tasks for primary school mathematics which can be implemented in the primary school easily. In order to these purposes, I suggest the types of performance assessment tasks and the framework of assessment standards for the balanced performance assessment with describing the procedures of developing tasks and rubrics. The types of task are journal writing, problem posing, constructed task, and descriptive task. In the framework of assessment standards, I suggest holistic scoring which are classified as four levels according to the degree of excellence which students perform totally concerning about the criterion of implication, reasoning, accuracy, and communication. Also I analyse the responses of children to the task “make a beautiful pattern” and suggest its assessment rubric and anchor papers for each level for illustrating the process of developing a rubric in holistic scoring. In order to reflect the viewpoints of children and their Parents concerning about the tasks, the responses in self assessment and parent assessment are analysed. Finally, methods of implementing the assessment tasks and considerations are discussed.

The primary school mathematics emphasizes some activities such as visualizing figures, drawing figures and comparing figures from various angles. These activities could be undertaken throughout examination, experiments and exploration of the substantial materials. They could also be undertaken by using the objects found in a daily life informally. The 7th curriculum of mathematics reflects this trend and includes the systematized activities in teaching spatial sense in geometry. However, it still requires more researches on the teaching methodology of spatial sense and the conceptual analysis of spatial sense. In this study, the concept of spatial sense is analyzed and Mackim's 3-levels teaching methodology and Bruner's EIS theory and suggestions are reviewed as a possible teaching methodology of spatial tasks. As a conclusion, this study suggests a teaching-learning methodology of spatial tasks at the levels of 2-GA and 3-Ga of the 7th curriculum of mathematics.

The function is a basic and key concept to understand mathematical problems. However, many students have difficulties to expand the knowledge to other related concepts and to transfer the knowledge to real world problems. The reasons for the problem may be that the concept of function is taught by simplified and abstracted formula without fully understanding of the reasoning process. Also, the examples for the concepts are artificial and not related to students' experiences. Situated learning theory provides great implications to solve these problems. So, this study was designed to teach the concept of function more meaningful to students by appling situated learning theory. Thirty-eight middle school students were participated in this study. Students were provided the instruction designed according to the principles of situated learning theory. Then, they were asked to complete attitude survey questionnair and a performance assessment task. The result showed that the instruction based on situated learning theory was useful to Promote students' understanding and motivation for learning. More implications of the study was provided in the paper.

This paper describes the teaching of mathematics in France at the elementary and secondary levels. It consists of four parts: the structure of the french education system and the status of mathematics within it, the evolution of mathematics teaching in France from 1968 to nowadays, the teacher training in France, the mathematical contents in the elementary school curriculum and the mathematics curriculum in the lower secondary school. From this review, we can extract some characteristics of the teaching of mathematics in France.

Since the greater part of mathematical concepts have been developed in the direction of “from the concrete and realistic aspects to the abstract level”, children should be secured to learn mathematics genetically with various manipulative materials. The aim of this study is to instigate the active use of geoboards in mathematics classroom. To achieve this arm, we first embodied the several significances on the use of geoboards in mathematics instruction. And we then performed an instruction that children discover and justify the formula related to the area of trapezoid by exploring with geoboards, and analyzed the instructional episode to support our assertion about some secure merit accompanied by using geoboards. From this study, we obtained the conclusion that geoboard activity contains many significances such as children can explore congruence, symmetry, similarity, fundamental properties of figures, and pattern. Futhermore, geoboard activity enable children to transform a figure into other equivalently, develop spatial sense, have basic experiences for coordinate geometry, build a concrete model to explain abstract ideas, and foster the ability of problem solving and mathematical thinking.