Author Archives: Elin Anderson
Understanding Cognition and the Concept of Number
How do children come to understand a concept? More specifically, how do they develop a concept of number? This is the underlying question to the work we do at the AIMS Center for Math and Science Education. In seeking the answer to this question, we have been reading research around cognition. Needless to say, we… Continue Reading
What Does it Mean to Coordinate in K-6 Mathematics?
In my last blog entry I talked about laying the foundation for fractions in K-2 by thinking about the standard for measurement 1.MD.2 as foundational for the conceptual understanding of fractions. In this entry, I am going to talk about what it means for a student to coordinate units. The word coordinate, when used as… Continue Reading
Laying the Foundation for Fractions
This spring, the Coordinating Units team will begin looking into how students develop an understanding of fractions. We have been reading the research in this area done by Dr. Leslie Steffe. In his research with students he theorizes that if students have a fully developed whole number sequence and are able to use it flexibly,… Continue Reading
What Every Student Needs to Know for Multiplication (Part 5)
***This is part 5 of a series. Click the links to go back and read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4*** For the past four weeks our team has been sharing the Towers Task activity progression in our blog posts. Last week, Darrell shared that, as students become adept at working with… Continue Reading
What Every Student Needs to Know for Multiplication (Part 1)
The topic of the latest AIMS Center colloquium was “What every student needs to know for multiplication” (Video Archive)(Resources). This presentation highlighted the work that we have been doing around understanding how students develop multiplicative reasoning. One of the things we are doing is implementing a task with second and third grade students called the… Continue Reading
Not Another Ball!
I can’t believe it’s been a year since I embarked on this journey as a Research Associate at the AIMS Center for Math and Science Education. It has been an exciting transition for me, having the opportunity to pursue my passion for understanding how children develop their knowledge of mathematics. Over the last year, I… Continue Reading
What I learned about Teaching Mathematics from the Great British Baking Show
During the past month I indulged in watching one of my favorite shows, The Great British Baking Show on PBS. The drama, the flour, the sugar and oh, how I love those British accents. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it is a contest that begins with twelve bakers and at the end… Continue Reading
“If I Could Turn Back Time” – Part 2
In my last post I wrote about one of my first experiences teaching math to second graders. At the time (way back in 1996!), the math adoption we were using was MathLand, which was very conceptually based. I had several teacher friends that were also educators comment that they loved MathLand and felt it really… Continue Reading
If I Could Turn Back Time
As we come to the end of another school year, our team here at the AIMS Center has been spending time reflecting on the past year of learning from students. We were asked the question, “If you could go back into the classroom, what would you do differently in regards to your math instruction?” I… Continue Reading
My Strategy or Their Strategy?
I have many friends with school age children who know that I work in the field of math education and are always eager to pick my brain on what their children are doing in class during math instruction. Since the implementation of the common core standards, a question I get asked many times is, “Why… Continue Reading
