The Asked & Answered department shares excerpts from discussion threads on the online MyNCTM community. In this issue, featured threads highlight responses to members' questions related to mathematical depth in preschool, spiral review in the upper elementary grades, ideas for differentiation in middle school, and projects for high school algebra.
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Amber G. Candela, Melissa D. Boston, and Juli K. Dixon
We discuss how discourse actions can provide students greater access to high quality mathematics. We define discourse actions as what teachers or students say or do to elicit student contributions about a mathematical idea and generate ongoing discussion around student contributions. We provide rubrics and checklists for readers to use.
Ryan Seth Jones, Zhigang Jia, and Joel Bezaire
Too often, statistical inference and probability are treated in schools like they are unrelated. In this paper, we describe how we supported students to learn about the role of probability in making inferences with variable data by building models of real world events and using them to simulate repeated samples.
Sandra M. Linder and Amanda Bennett
This article presents examples of how early childhood educators (prek-2nd grade) might use their daily read alouds as a vehicle for increasing mathematical talk and mathematical connections for their students.
Erell Germia and Nicole Panorkou
We present a Scratch task we designed and implemented for teaching and learning coordinates in a dynamic and engaging way. We use the 5Es framework to describe the students' interactions with the task and offer suggestions of how other teachers may adopt it to successfully implement Scratch tasks.
Joe F. Allison
When I was in graduate school, my math professor, using a straightedge and a compass, marked off a unit distance and then halved it. He said he could halve the exact ½ again and exactly get ¼. He was leading up to infinite series.
Krista L. Strand and Katie Bailey
K-5 teachers deepen their understanding of the Common Core content standards by engaging in collaborative drawing activities during professional development workshops.
M. Kathleen Heid
Technological tools for mathematics instruction have evolved over the past fifty years. Some of these tools have opened the door to explorations of new mathematics. Features of others have made access to curricular mathematics more convenient. Thoughts on this evolution are shared.
Nicholas H. Wasserman, Keith Weber, Timothy Fukawa-Connelly, and Juan Pablo Mejía-Ramos
A 2D version of Cavalieri's Principle is productive for the teaching of area. In this manuscript, we consider an area-preserving transformation, “segment-skewing,” which provides alternative justification methods for area formulas, conceptual insights into statements about area, and foreshadows transitions about area in calculus via the Riemann integral.
The Asked & Answered department shares excerpts from discussion threads on the online MyNCTM community. In this issue, featured threads highlight responses to members' questions regarding 1st grade number sense, multiplication and division of fractions, issues of definition and precision related to circles, and the value of rationalizing denominators.
