The goal of the present research is to describe five lower-secondary in-service mathematics teachers' development of ICT (Information Communication Tech-nology) integration in their teaching as a result of mentoring pre-service teachers who practiced the integration of technology in their mathematics teaching. This is done through the combination of Schoenfeld's Teaching-in-Context theory and Goos' community of practice framework. To collect the research data, the re-searchers used semi-structured interviews with the in-service teachers at the be-ginning and end of the academic year. In addition, several observations of lessons taught by the in-service teachers with the assist of pre-service teachers were rec-orded towards the end of the intervention. The research findings indicate that the community of practice context can serve as an escalator that supports the decision of in-service mathematics teachers to integrate ICT in their mathematics teaching. However, these decisions were conditioned by taking care of the students' formal procedural mathematical knowledge.

Researchers of mathematics education have been paying attention to the affective aspect of learning mathematics for more than one decade. Different theoretical frameworks have been suggested to analyze this aspect, where we utilize in the present research the discursive framework of Evans, Morgan and Tsatsaroni. This framework enables to link students" positions to their emotions. Here, we add to this relationship the metacognition variable, where we study how the added variable affects students" positioning in mathematical activities. A group of three Grade 7 high-achieving students participated in the research. They used GeoGebra to learn the topic of perpendicular lines through an authentic activity. The research results indicate that most of the means of claiming leadership were metacognitive in nature and were performed to enable the advancement of the group learning of the topic of perpendicular straight lines. These means were primarily requesting actions, initiating actions, performing actions, declaring actions, taking decisions, evaluation, monitoring and regulation. In one case, the claiming of leadership was accompanied with positive affect, namely enthusiasm, determination, and enjoyment. In the other case, the claiming of leadership was accompanied with different positive affect that included self-confidence and being proud of oneself.

Problem posing and technology are attracting the attention of mathematics educators because of their potential to affect positively many aspects of students' learning. Little research has been done on the relationship between technology and mathematical creativity. The present study investigates this issue in the context of problem posing, in the presence and absence of a strategy for problem posing (the "what-if-not" strategy). Participants were pre-service mathematics teachers. The research was conducted during the academic year 2013-2014. Participants were randomly divided into four groups of 19 to 21 participants and who differed in their use of technology and of the what-if-not strategy. The participants who used technology used the Paper Pools applet. The data was collected from the participants' posing problems on a specific mathematics situation; the Paper Pool situation. The data analysis was done using SPSS 18.0. The research findings indicate that the combination of technology and the what-if-not strategy has a positive and significant effect on the three components of participants' creativity: fluency, flexibility and originality. Separately, both technology and the what-if-not strategy had a positive and significant effect on participants' fluency and flexibility related to problem types, but not related to strategy types. The findings also indicate that the originality of participants who worked without technology but with the what-if-not strategy was significantly lower than that of participants who worked with technology, whether with or without the what-if-not strategy. Thus, results indicated that technology is more effective than the what-if-not strategy in encouraging originality in problem posing. We recommend the use of technology together with the what-if-not strategy to enhance pre-service teachers' mathematical thinking, because this combination makes available for student's learning multiple agencies required for his/her creative acts.

Researchers are interested in students' motivation to learn science as it impacts other aspects of students' learning. One aspect of this motivation is the gender issue, how it impacts student's motivation and how it is mediated and moderated by other educational variables. The issue of gender impact on motivation has been studied for more than two decades, which makes the present research interested in studying how background variables as student's ability, school level and teacher's gender moderate the relationship between student's gender and the different components of science motivation. The research design is that of moderation design through multiple regression. The sampling was a cluster sampling. The instrument used was the socialcognitive motivation questionnaire, and data analysis was done using regression and moderation analysis in SPSS 25 Statistical Package. Eight hundred, thirty-seven students, from the primary, middle and secondary schools participated in the research. The research results indicated that each of the three variables moderated between student's gender and part of the components of science motivation. The research concludes that the science teaching methods need to be diverse to fit both male and female science students, which could assist the learning of science in the secondary school from the two genders. Moreover, utilizing different teaching methods would support all ability -level students. In addition, holding workshops for teachers that discuss the gender issue in science education can help address this issue.

STEM education is a new field within which understandings of what constitutes effective practice, and how this can be supported, are still in their infancy. The present research describes the experiences of prospective elementary school teachers in designing collaboratively STEM activities. This designing experiences occurred in a context of a PD program called "Introduction to STEM education". During the STEM PD program, the pre-service teachers worked in six groups. Each group included three pre-service teachers who worked together throughout the PD program. Three written STEM units of three groups were chosen to be analyzed. In analyzing the STEM units, we referred to the STEM capabilities which consists of three components: STEM knowledge, skills and ways of thinking. The findings show different possibilities that STEM education can afford for task design. In terms of the integration of disciplines, the three analyzed units included activities in which, mostly, at least two disciplines were dominant. In terms of STEM skills, the designed unites targeted mainly the individual learning STEM skill instead of collaborative skills, which emphasize the need to pay special emphasis to this issue. Finally, in terms of STEM ways of thinking, analytical and evidence-based ways of thinking prevailed in the three units. The previous findings point at the importance of support for pre-service teachers to design STEM activities for implementation in their classrooms.

Researchers point at the need to study the creative processes of students in problem solving, as these may indicate how to encourage creative problem solving. The present research attempts to study, based on the heuristic framework of Polya, pre-service teachers' flexibility processes when they solve a mathematical problem with technology.  The research was held in a teacher college, where two second-year classes of 49 mathematics pre-service teachers (24 in the academic year 2017-2018 and 25 in the academic year 2018-2019) participated in the research. The pre-service teachers were requested to solve the halving-the-rectangle problem with technology, specifically with the GeoGebra software. The research results indicated that generally the participants, who performed flexibility processes, used a sequence of creativity processes: conjecturing, specialization, verifying consequences with technology and generalization.  The conjecturing process utilized mathematical relationship or inference from analogy, where the inference from analogy advanced gradually through solution modifications.

Self-efficacy constructs could predict students’ practices and affect in learning the sciences. Researchers have pointed at such constructs as predictors of students’ mathematics achievement and performance. Self-efficacy was also studied as predictor of emotions in learning mathematics, though little research has done so regarding self-efficacy as predictor of creative emotions. Another predictor of creative emotions could be curiosity. The present study has a regression-based modelling design, where it examined whether a set of constructs of self-efficacy in creativity or/and a set of constructs of curiosity predict significantly creative emotions in mathematical problem solving. Five hundred Grade 8-10 students participated in the study. Data were collected using three self-report questionnaires that measured the research constructs. Data analysis used SPSS 21. Results from multiple regression indicated that the set of constructs of self-efficacy in creativity explained significantly 29.6% of the variance in creative emotions. Moreover, the set of constructs of curiosity explained 17.8% of the variance in creative emotions. Furthermore, three of the five independent variables had best prediction of creative emotions, explaining 32.9% of the variance in creative emotions. The results of the stepwise regression showed that self-efficacy in originality and stretching curiosity were the first two variables in a set of three variables that best explained the variance in creative emotions. The research results lead to the recommendation of developing the previous two constructs in classroom setting to cultivate students’ creative emotions and thus their creative practices.

The research community still faces challenges with respect to understanding and promoting mathematics teachers’ knowledge related to integrating technology into their instruction. This study’s goals are: (1) to examine the relations between the various components of pedagogical technology knowledge (PTK), (2) to examine whether teachers’ PTK differed significantly after their participation in a professional development (PD) program designed to enhance Community of Inquiry (CoI) practices, and (3) to examine the effect of teachers’ personal characteristics on PTK components and on their development. This study involved 42 middle school mathematics teachers. The data, collected using Thomas and Palmer’s PTK questionnaire, underwent a statistical analysis. Through the quantitative analysis, scores for each PTK component were computed and appropriate statistical tests were run. The results indicate that, aside from knowledge of mathematical content, all the components of PTK and PTK itself demonstrate strong correlations. In addition, the results showed that teachers’ PTK components differed significantly after they participated in a CoI PD program, except for the knowledge of mathematical content component. The background variables had significant effects on some PTK components’ scores and on their development among the participants.