Quantity: Challenging the Assumption of a Shared Definition

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Modeling and Developing Usable Knowledge of Mathematics Teaching

Abstract

In our current work, we are conducting teacher professional development in the domain of proportional reasoning. We have focused our tasks and instruction on three big ideas: quantity, covariation, and constant. What we are learning is that a key taken-as-shared concept, quantity, may not have the shared understanding assumed in the literature and the standards. In this paper, we use data from one professional development workshop to warrant our conjecture that teachers may not have a shared understanding for this key idea. We end with implications and ideas for further research.

Authors

• James P. Burke

• Chandra H. Orrill, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Hamza Malik, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Akira Harper, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Martha Epstein, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Rachael Eriksen Brown, Penn State Abington