Curriculum guidelines and professional organizations’ recommendations lack details about how often and how much students should write in mathematics and what characteristics should define their writing. This study presents an analytic framework that addresses how often students are prompted in student mathematics books to write, how much they may be encouraged to write, and the characteristics of the writing prompts. Consequently, 2,095 writing prompts in student books across 10 comprehensive Grade 3 resources were analyzed. Findings indicate a marked variation in how often and how much students are positioned to write. Most prompts have students explain what they did to solve a problem and why about number concepts, with most pressing for procedures. The greatest percentage of prompts had students write about their own solutions and do not urge them to include specific writing features.

When we submitted our proposal to edit a Special Issue of Tech Trends on technology-enhanced learning environments in classrooms from Kindergarten through Grades 12 (K-12) two years ago we, like everyone else, had no idea what the past 15 months would have looked like due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Educators have responded heroicallyquickly entering emergency teaching modedesigning asynchronous, synchronous, and bichronous learning experiences (Martin et al. 2020) for their students. Numerous digital technologies have supported their work in multiple ways. By drastically changing the way the majority of instruction is delivered, teachers, curriculum developers, and educational leaders have been creative, innovative, and flexible. It is likely that our own personal experiences over the past two years have provided examples of the affordances that technology can have on supporting teaching and learning. And as a result, one may read the following contributions with a new perspective. It is important to note that due to the initial timeline of submissions this special issue is not focused on how technology enhanced teaching and learning during COVID-19.Technology can support teaching and learning. However, it must be carefully examined to understand the extent to how it should be used with learners in K-12 contexts and learning environments (International Society for Technology in Education [ISTE], 2016;Ross 2020). We open the special issue with specific thoughts that we hope will be helpful to readers.

Mathematical writing recently has been defined as writing to reason and communicate mathematically. But mathematics instructional resources lack guidance for teachers as to how to implement such writing. The purpose of this paper is to describe how methods of design‐based research were used to develop an instructional resource when one does not currently exist. Thirty‐four participants—including teachers, mathematics coaches, mathematics curriculum developers, literacy coaches, a mathematician, and academics in elementary mathematics education, mathematics education, writing education, and science education—participated in a multi‐step process to recommend, revise, and confirm instructional guidelines for elementary mathematical writing. The development process began with thirty‐two recommendations from science writing and language arts writing. Through multiple cycles of feedback, five instructional guidelines and related considerations and techniques for implementation of elementary mathematical writing emerged.

Understanding the types of and purposes for elementary mathematical writing can provide a framework to guide mathematical writing instruction.

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