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Purpose: This study aims to describe the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of a kindergarten educator who implements a lesson plan about informal inferential reasoning designed in a lesson study group. Design/methodology/approach: To this end, we analyzed teaching interventions in two kindergarten lessons focused on the playful task of tossing two coins, associated with inferential statistical reasoning. The study highlights the importance of arguing and promoting this reasoning to develop statistical thinking. It is crucial to recognize how early students can be subject to learning experiences that promote a language of uncertainty, assess the evidence provided by the data, and make generalizations. Findings: The results reveal that while the educator demonstrated knowledge and skills relevant to the curriculum and conceptual teaching strategies, the understanding of the content by the students and the integration of the PCK components still present a challenge. Practical implications: The lesson study collaborative teaching practices that promote PCK have proven effective for informing the design and implementation of instructional practices supporting the development of early statistical thinking in young children. Originality/value: The study enriches the knowledge regarding the potential of the lesson study (LS) in the professional learning of kindergarten educators. It also contributes to a comprehensive approach based on authentic playful experiences in grade K that supports the development of early statistical thinking in young children.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the digital competence displayed by a primary school teacher who implemented an interdisciplinary cross-border lesson that was designed with the lesson study methodology and involved two countries--Brazil and Chile. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative methodology was adopted via the case study method through which the case of a sixth-grade Chilean teacher participating in the study was documented. The data were collected through a lesson plan, a videotape of the implemented lesson and a questionnaire. A professional digital competence framework for teachers provided an analytical perspective via data analysis. Findings: The results show that the teacher displayed digital competence in a synchronous collaborative learning environment in which she had time to reflect on the educational value of technology and appropriate teaching methods involving information and communication technologies. Certain elements of the studied case contributed to this performance, namely the cross-border context, the classroom setting and the collaborative Lesson Study methodology. Practical implications: The lesson study methodology facilitated the teacher's performance in the "Pedagogy and didactics" digital competence by enabling her to participate in planning and implementing a lesson that allowed all those who collaborated, including teachers and researchers, to reflect on teaching in a digital learning environment. Social implications: The cross-border context, which involved co-designing and implementing a lesson in two countries, allowed the teacher to display her "School in society" and "Ethics" competencies. This was achieved through connecting two classrooms with different languages and cultures digitally and synchronously, thereby providing students the opportunity to debate and participate in a global and local problem such as a country's responsibility for energy consumption. Originality/value: Modern society requires the transformation of school practices, and new teaching approaches should include the provision of collaborative spaces that incorporate digital technologies. In this sense, this paper shows that cross-border lessons involving a synchronous learning environment offer a potential alternative, as digital teaching competence enables teachers to bring together different social and cultural groups virtually, thereby contributing to the reduction of social gaps and to the promotion of positive identity among less advantaged students.

Among the critical components related to the improvement of mathematics learning are the design of high cognitive demand tasks and teachers' ability to maintain these cognitive demands during their implementation of lessons. We investigate the factors affecting the maintenance and decline of cognitive demand in the implementation of a statistics lesson by two teachers who participated in a Lesson Study group for third graders (8-9 years old). The results of the investigation show notable changes in the maintenance factors associated with the teachers' questions and feedback, the scaffolding provided for the students' reasoning and the modelling of high-level performance. In terms of the decline in the level of cognitive demand, the greatest changes were found in factors corresponding to the routinization of problematic aspects of the task and to problems in lesson management. Based on the results of our collaborative work with teachers in the context of Lesson Study, we conclude that it is possible to design and implement statistical tasks in primary school classrooms that maintain high cognitive demand.

Web-based courses are promising in that they are effective and have the possibility of their instructional design being improved over time. However, the assessments of said courses are criticized in terms of their validity. This paper is an exploratory case study regarding the validity of the assessment system used in a semi presential web-based course. The course uses an authentic assessment system that includes online forums, online tests, self-evaluations, and the assessment of e-learner processes and products by a tutor, peers, and an expert. The validity of the system was checked using internal and external criteria. The results show that the authentic assessment system addresses technical problems, especially regarding reliability of instruments. Some suggestions are proposed to strengthen authentic assessment in web-based courses and to test it. (Contains 9 tables.)

The social distancing measures that were imposed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, led many countries to adopt distance education. In Chile, a group of teachers sought to support children's education, and with the combined efforts of parents, teachers and administrators took up the challenge of how to help children continue learning in such an adverse environment. To this end, an open-access television program, specifically to support daily math for grade 1 children, was created. The program, which was available on the Internet, comprised fifty-seven video clips based on the official school text and tutor-student interaction. The present paper reports on this initiative and its outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to establish to what extent teachers' knowledge, in association with school socioeconomic level, students' previous knowledge and level of mathematical knowledge achieved in school contribute to the knowledge that fourth-grade students reach in conceptualizing fractions. Information was obtained from 328 fourth-grade students of nine schools and their respective mathematics teachers. The results show that the 77% of variability observed in the conceptualization of fractions could be attributed to student-level variables, while the remaining 23% would be attributable to school-level variables. On the other hand, 38% of the intra-school variance could be explained by students' previous knowledge, and virtually all the between-schools variance would be explained by the academic level of the school or, in 32% of cases, by the socioeconomic status of the school. Teacher knowledge, alone or in combination with other factors, accounts for about 10%, with a significance of 10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the impact of a scaffolding system that connects theory and practice to promote the development of the ability to teach mathematics in 100 future Chilean preschool teachers. The theoretical dimension and the practical dimension of both mathematical content knowledge (MCK) and mathematical pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) were analysed. Data were collected and analysed following a mixed approach. The results of the study reveal the effectiveness of the system in the theoretical dimension and the difficulties that arise in classroom practices. The critical role of the specialized components of MPCK in the theory-practice articulation is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that explored teacher awareness of student statistical knowledge and the teaching of statistical content. The study used three items related to statistical education including graph comprehension, differentiation between cognitive levels, and the understanding that arises from changing representational systems, and reveals students' great difficulty to produce and read statistics in their various possibilities of presentation.