Getting the right answers in maths is only half the problem. Understanding why what you're doing works is the part that often stumps students and teachers alike. The essential guide for mathematics teachers and those training to teach, "Yes, but Why?" answers all your questions, and sheds light on the hidden connections between…

Fractions are an imperative skill for students to master to achieve success in future mathematics concepts and classes. Yet many students, especially those experiencing math difficulties and/or characteristics of emotional and behavioral disorders, continue to exit elementary school without a concrete foundation of fractions skills required to…

For students to develop adequate conceptual understanding about fractions, they require experiences that afford them opportunities to think flexibly about multiple interpretations of fractions. This article presents a sequence of lessons designed to offer such experiences for students in Years 3 and Year 4. The lessons adopt a challenging tasks…

Productive struggle is an essential part of mathematics instruction that promotes learning with deep understanding. A video scenario is used to provide a glimpse of productive struggle in action and to showcase its characteristics for both students and teachers. Suggestions for supporting productive struggle are provided.

In grade 3, students are expected to be able to represent a fraction on a number line by first identifying the interval from 0 to 1 as the unit and by partitioning the unit as needed on the basis of the denominator. This task extends these grade 3 fraction goals stated in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010)…

This document includes instructional tips on: (1) Building on students' informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial fraction concepts; (2) Helping students recognize that fractions are numbers that expand the number system beyond whole numbers, and using number lines to teach this and other fraction concepts; (3)…

Meaningful inclusion of quantitative reasoning into mathematics instruction requires meaningful ways to evaluate it. Few formative assessments exist to evaluate the strategies students use when reasoning mathematically. The Framework for Evaluating Quantitative Reasoning Strategies presented in this article provides teachers with categories for…

In this article, Lindsey Fowler describes how an animal rhyme--that she shared with her fifth-grade students with the intention of assisting them with the concept of metric conversions--made fostering the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) more difficult. The addition of animals, which added an extraneous element that students mistakenly…

Gap reasoning is an inappropriate strategy for comparing fractions. In this article, Patrick Sullivan and Joann Barnett look at the persistence of this misconception amongst students and the insights teachers can draw about students' reasoning.

Paper folding is an easy and inexpensive way to engage students artistically, culturally, and mathematically. The pinwheel base is the source for many origami playthings, from a pinwheel to a boat to a butterfly. This article explores a fourth grade activity that repurposes the pinwheel base into a rich and inexpensive manipulative for the review…

Productive struggle leads to productive classrooms where students work on complex problems, are encouraged to take risks, can struggle and fail yet still feel good about working on hard problems (Boaler, 2016). Teachers can foster a classroom culture that values and promotes productive struggle by providing students with challenging tasks. These…

Without a doubt, fractions prove to be a stumbling block for many children. Researchers have suggested a variety of explanations for why this is the case. The introduction of symbolization and operations before the development of conceptual understanding of fractions, a lack of understanding of the role of the numerator and denominator, and an…

The "Making Meaning for Operations Casebook" was developed as the key resource for participants' Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar experience. The twenty-nine cases, written by teachers describing real situations and actual student thinking in their classrooms, provide the basis of each session's investigation of specific…

Most students can follow this simple procedure for division of fractions: "Ours is not to reason why, just invert and multiply." But how many really understand what division of fractions means--especially fraction division with respect to the meaning of the remainder. The purpose of this article is to provide an instructional method as a…

The author wants her students to see any new mathematics--fractions, negative numbers, algebra--as logical extensions of what they already know. This article describes two students' efforts to make sense of their conflicting interpretations of 1/2 × -6, both of which were compelling and logical to them. It describes how discussion, constructing…