Addition and Subtraction, Part 1: Story Problems

Overview In this resource, we discuss the teaching and learning of addition and subtraction. Often, students’ understanding of this topic is heavily grounded in rote computation of numbers, separated from any real-life context. Unfortunately, this can leave gaps in...

Place Value: How to Assess Students’ Understanding

  From Marilyn Burns Math Blog, January 18, 2016. Excerpt: If you’re familiar with Cooks Illustrated magazine, you know that they use their test kitchen to tinker with recipes and improve on them. In each issue, they report on all of the attempts they make and...

Working with Historical Sources

This is the third in a series of eight resources on historical argumentation written especially for the Lesson Study Group at Mills College by educator Stan Pesick. These resources are designed to be used individually to help define inquiry questions for use in Lesson...

Decimals

Overview In this resource, we discuss the teaching and learning of decimals. We consider important similarities and differences between decimals and fractions, qualities of our base-ten number system to emphasize when teaching decimals, and considerations for...

Fluency and Flexibility with Numbers

Have you seen students in upper elementary or middle school use their fingers to calculate? What early elementary experiences would build fluency with mental calculation so students would not need to rely on their fingers in later grades? The mathematics resource...
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