Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.
Browse
Developing Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Area Through a Units Intervention
Megan H. Wickstrom
Bridging Modeling and Environmental Issues
Hyunyi Jung, Megan H. Wickstrom, and Chris Piasecki
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch activity involves an urgent environmental issue that students can discuss. It engages students in the interpretation of visual data, measurements, units, and the area of regular and irregular figures.
Empowering Latinx Families to Help Children with Mathematics
Sabrina De Los Santos Rodríguez, Audrey Martínez-Gudapakkam, and Judy Storeygard
An innovative program addresses the digital divide with short, engaging videos modeling mathematic activities sent to families through a free mobile app.
Facilitating Student-Created Math Walks
Min Wang, Candace Walkington, and Koshi Dhingra
An example of an after-school club activity gives educators some tools and suggestions to implement such an approach in their schools.
Puddle Play!
Deanna Pecaski McLennan
Discourse Actions to Promote Student Access
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.
Using Scratch Programming to Explore Coordinates
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.
Funky Protractors for Exploring Angle Measure
Hamilton L. Hardison and Hwa Young Lee
In this article, we discuss funky protractor tasks, which we designed to provide opportunities for students to reason about protractors and angle measure. We address how we have implemented these tasks, as well as how students have engaged with them.
