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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-aas-10.1177_00953997211012418 for The Role of Collaboration in Complying With COVID-19 Health Protective Behaviors: A Cross-National Study by Donna Sedgwick, James Hawdon, Pekka Räsänen and Aki Koivula in Administration & Society

Calculation depends on the majority of the abilities within the domain of general intelligence (Blair et al., 2005). Most major theories of intelligence include numeracy or quantitative thinking as one aspect of general cognitive skills (Kaufman et al., 2013). In Chapter 1 of this volume, O’Neill and Gillespie described an example of the cognitively complex social practice of sharing a cup of tea. This activity includes actions like buying tea, measuring the amount of water needed and using a machine to boil it, telephoning a friend’s number, and inviting him or her for a visit to a certain address at a certain time. An interesting aspect of this list of actions is that all the activities require using measurement systems or numbers. In fact, numbers and numerical cognition are embedded in our current society. Learning is a cognitively demanding activity and learning or relearning numeracy is particularly demanding. That is why numeracy is one of the key targets of basic education; and may explain the relative scarcity of attempts to rehabilitate mathematical cognition.

Many empirical studies have shown that students’ mathematical difficulties are often connected to language factors. In this chapter, we discuss this issue from different perspectives and with regard to different groups of students. First, differences between everyday and academic language on word, sentence, and text/discourse level and their implications for mathematics learning processes are discussed. Secondly, it is described how language factors affect the achievement of specific groups of students: second-language learners, students with learning disabilities in mathematics and reading, and students with specific language impairment. Thirdly, important language dimensions for the mathematics learning focusing on the use of language as a learning medium and discourse practices are presented. Finally, it is concluded that instructional approaches seem to become most effective for supporting mathematics learning when they provide learning opportunities especially for the discourse practices of explaining meanings of mathematical concepts and operations and for describing general pattern.

Technology has entered education quickly. In developed countries children and teachers have access to hundreds of thousands of learning applications and games. However, the digital divide is significant: some parts of the world still lack the basic requirements for participation in the digital revolution, such as electricity. Development of solar power and mobile technology will narrow this gap, rapidly revolutionizing the access to devices for technology-enabled education globally. One such area of advancements in technology is teacher education, where massive open online courses (MOOC) and other Internet sources offer today’s teachers the means to learn about the best pedagogies. Even though there is still a debate about the effectiveness of using educational technologies and the results have been inconclusive, the use of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in education is increasing inevitably as the technologies get cheaper. At the same time, the rise in controlled intervention studies of TEL to support children and adults with MLD is offering new possibilities to understand the mechanisms of learning mathematics. During the last 10–15 years, the focus has been on different types of interventions to develop the number sense of the children with MLD. Slowly the interest is turning to more comprehensive models taking into account the core features of numerical understanding, the multiple concepts and representations in mathematics, and the cognitive skills needed in numerical processing, as well as the best pedagogical practices of special needs education.