Developing Fractions Knowledge

Supporting and understanding your students’ fractional knowledge is crucial to their overall grasp of numbers and mathematics. By centralizing around three key stages of development, this effective guide will help you to assess your students’ understanding of fractions and modify your teaching accordingly. These key stages are identified as: Stage 1a: Fair Sharing Stage 1b: Part-Whole Stage 2a: Disembedding and IteratingStage 2b: Measuring with Unit Fractions Stage 2c: Reversing Fractions Stage 3a: Fractions as Numbers Stage 3b: Operating with Fractions As the newest addition to the bestselling Maths Recovery Series, this book will be a useful guide for all primary classroom teachers and assistants, including experienced Mathematics Recovery instructors.

Supporting and understanding your students’ fractional knowledge is crucial to their overall grasp of numbers and mathematics. By centralizing around three key stages of development, this effective guide will help you to assess your students’ understanding of fractions and modify your teaching accordingly. These key stages are identified as: Stage 1a: Fair Sharing Stage 1b: Part-Whole Stage 2a: Disembedding and IteratingStage 2b: Measuring with Unit Fractions Stage 2c: Reversing Fractions Stage 3a: Fractions as Numbers Stage 3b: Operating with Fractions As the newest addition to the bestselling Maths Recovery Series, this book will be a useful guide for all primary classroom teachers and assistants, including experienced Mathematics Recovery instructors.

Following the great success of the earlier books, this fourth book in the Mathematics Recovery series equips teachers with detailed pedagogical knowledge and resources for teaching number to 7 to 11-year olds. Drawing on extensive programs of research, curriculum development, and teacher development, the book offers a coherent, up-to-date approach emphasising computational fluency and the progressive development of students′ mathematical sophistication. The book is organized in key domains of number instruction, including structuring numbers 1 to 20, knowledge of number words and numerals, conceptual place value, mental computation, written computation methods, fractions, and early algebraic reasoning. Features include: fine-grained progressions of instruction within each domain; detailed descriptions of students′ strategies and difficulties; assessment tasks with notes on students′ responses; classroom-ready instructional activities; This book is designed for classroom and intervention teachers, special education teachers and classroom assistants. The book is an invaluable resource for mathematics advisors and coaches, learning support staff, numeracy consultants, curriculum developers, teacher educators and researchers.

Children’s Fractional Knowledge elegantly tracks the construction of knowledge, both by children learning new methods of reasoning and by the researchers studying their methods. The book challenges the widely held belief that children’s whole number knowledge is a distraction from their learning of fractions by positing that their fractional learning involves reorganizing—not simply using or building upon—their whole number knowledge. This hypothesis is explained in detail using examples of actual grade-schoolers approaching problems in fractions including the schemes they construct to relate parts to a whole, to produce a fraction as a multiple of a unit part, to transform a fraction into a commensurate fraction, or to combine two fractions multiplicatively or additively. These case studies provide a singular journey into children’s mathematics experience, which often varies greatly from that of adults. Moreover, the authors’ descriptive terms reflect children’s quantitative operations, as opposed to adult mathematical phrases rooted in concepts that do not reflect—and which in the classroom may even suppress—youngsters’ learning experiences. Highlights of the coverage: Toward a formulation of a mathematics of living instead of being Operations that produce numerical counting schemes Case studies: children’s part-whole, partitive, iterative, and other fraction schemes Using the generalized number sequence to produce fraction schemes Redefining school mathematics This fresh perspective is of immediate importance to researchers in mathematics education. With the up-close lens onto mathematical development found in Children’s Fractional Knowledge, readers can work toward creating more effective methods for improving young learners’ quantitative reasoning skills.

A Focus on Fractions is a groundbreaking effort to make the mathematics education research on how students develop their understanding of fraction concepts readily accessible and understandable to pre- and in-service K– 8 mathematics educators. Using extensive annotated samples of student work, as well as vignettes characteristic of classroom teachers’ experiences, this book equips educators with the knowledge and tools to reveal students’ thinking so that they can modify their teaching and improve student learning of fraction concepts. A Focus on Fractions 2nd edition includes sections on the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) Fraction Framework integrated into each chapter as well as a new chapter on the OGAP Fraction Progression and how it can be used for formative assessment purposes. This updated edition assists teachers in translating research findings into their classroom practice by conveying detailed information about how students develop fraction understandings. Additional images and examples serve to flesh out and supplement the newly-introduced concepts in this updated and expanded edition. Special Features: Looking Back Questions at the end of each chapter provide teachers the opportunity to analyze student thinking and consider instructional strategies for their own students. Instructional Links help teachers relate concepts from the chapter to their own instructional materials and programs. Big Ideas frame the chapters and provide a platform for meaningful exploration of the teaching of fractions. Answer Key posted online offers extensive explanations of in-chapter questions. New sections devoted to the CCSSM and OGAP Fraction Progression are woven throughout the book as well as a new stand alone chapter on the OGAP Fraction Progression. The OGAP Fraction Framework is an all-new eResource, now available as a free download from the book’s website: www.routledge.com/9781138816442.

Do your students suppose that 1/3 is greater than 1/2, since 3 is greater than 2? Do they believe that having “halves” means having two, and only two, congruent “pieces” of a whole? What tasks can you offer—what questions can you ask—to determine what your students know or don’t know—and move them forward in their thinking? This book focuses on the specialised pedagogical content knowledge that you need to teach fractions effectively in grades 3–5. The authors demonstrate how to use this multifaceted knowledge to address the big ideas and essential understandings that students must develop for success with fractions—not only in their current work, but also in higher-level mathematics and a myriad of real-world contexts. Explore rich, research-based strategies and tasks that show how students are reasoning about and making sense of fractions. Use the opportunities that these and similar tasks provide to build on their understanding while identifying and correcting misunderstandings that may be keeping them from taking the next steps in learning.

This popular text addresses the urgent need for curriculum materials that cross traditional boundaries to include many of the elements that are integrated in the teaching/learning enterprise: mathematics content, teacher understanding, student thinking, teaching methods, instructional activities, and assessment. The book pushes readers beyond the limits of their current understanding of rational numbers, challenging them to refine and explain their thinking--without falling back on rules and procedures they have relied on throughout their lives. Written in a conversational and easy to understand style, this is not a textbook as much as it is a resource book. An underlying assumption is that facilitating teacher understanding using the same questions and activities that may be used with children is one way to help teachers build the comfort and confidence they need to begin talking to children about complex ideas. Unlike a textbook that is used to study formal theory and then discarded when it comes to putting ideas into practice, the many problems and activities included to facilitate teacher learning are valuable resources for use in elementary and middle school classrooms. Changes in the second edition include: *even more student work incorporated in every chapter; *discussion of the connectivity between the topics addressed in the book and the elementary and middle school mathematics curricula; *an increased emphasis on measurement; *expansion of some topics, including number sense, percent, scale factors, similarity, and linear graphs; *clarification of the characteristics of ratio and proportions and how to use these to generate discussion with children; and *content-related interview questions for exploring children's thinking. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and curriculum developers in mathematics education, pre-service and in-service teachers of mathematics, those involved in the mathematical and pedagogical preparation of mathematics teachers, and graduate students in mathematics education. The methods and activities it includes have been tested with students in grades 3-8 and with pre-service and in-service teachers and other adults. This text is accompanied by MORE--a supplement that is not merely an answer key but a resource that includes in-depth discussions of all the problems in the text; develops and extends discussion of the issues, teaching problems, and other considerations raised in the chapters; and contains additional problems--with and without solutions--that instructors may find helpful for assessment purposes.