As a result of innovations in technology, the prevalence of the Internet, and the increasing availability of computers in classrooms and homes, an enhanced approach for teaching and learning mathematics using manipulatives and computers is emerging. This new approach essentially creates a new class of manipulatives, called virtual manipulatives, as well as new capabilities, or toolkits, for computer programs that use visual representations. These new virtual manipulatives have all the useful properties of existing computer manipulatives while overcoming many of their disadvantages, yet very little is known or written about them. The purpose of this article is to establish a working definition of virtual manipulatives, highlight examples of virtual manipulatives on the Internet, and discuss their current and potential classroom use.

This study examines professional development activities provided for mathematics and science teachers in the National Science Foundation’s Math and Science Partnership Program by analyzing a cross‐sectional sample of over 2000 professional development (PD) activities in the program. Data were gathered from secondary source documents and surveys to examine core and structural features of professional development offerings (i.e. form, collective participation, content, duration and outcomes). The results from this sample of PD activities for mathematics and science teachers were mixed. There was evidence of research‐based practices, including the collective participation by teachers at the same grade levels, a focus on content‐specific training and sufficient duration. However, courses and workshops continued as the dominant form of PD delivery, there are few measures used to assess the PD activities, and the partnerships did not connect PD efforts for mathematics and science teachers with classroom practices and student achievement outcomes. These findings indicate that the delivery of PD has adopted important research‐based strategies, but that the partnerships need to design better methods for documenting growth in teacher knowledge and connecting that growth with student outcomes.

In an elementary school classroom, as in real life, the lines between the content areas should be blurred, particularly between mathematical problem solving and mathematical situations contextualized in good literature. For that reason, I always look for interesting books about mathematical situations. Why use children's literature to teach mathematics? A good story often places mathematical problems in the context of familiar situations and is similar to, yet a much more elaborate version of, mathematical word problems. Assertions that children's inability to solve word problems results from their inability to read or to compute effectively simply are not true. The problem is that children do not know how to choose the correct operation or sequence of operations to solve the problem. To solve a problem situation presented in words, children need to be able to connect computational processes with appropriate calculations. Their difficulties lie in the fact that children simply do not understand the mathematics well enough conceptually to make the connection with the problem- solving situation. Using books with authentic problem situations may help children see that learning computation serves a real-life purpose.