Deborah Schifter, Virginia Bastable, and Susan Jo Russell

The Measuring Space in One, Two, and Three Dimensions Casebook was developed as the key resource for participants’ Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar experience. The thirty cases, written by teachers describing real situations and actual student thinking in their classrooms, provide the basis of each session’s investigation of specific mathematical concepts and teaching strategies.

As a participant you will be actively engaged in your own learning, reading and discussing the cases under the guidance of a facilitator. You will—

• learn to recognize the key mathematical ideas with which your students are grappling;

• consider the types of classroom settings and teaching strategies that support the development of student understanding;

• become aware of how core mathematical ideas develop across the grades;

• work on mathematical concepts and gain better understanding of mathematical content; and

• discover how to continue learning about children and mathematics.

The casebook is composed of eight chapters: the first seven consist of classroom cases from kindergarten through grade 7; chapter 8 is an essay providing an overview of the research related to the situations described in the first seven chapters. The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1       Different aspects of size

Chapter 2       Composing and decomposing in one, two, and three dimensions

Chapter 3       Measuring length: What is a unit and how is it used?

Chapter 4       Measuring area: Structuring rectangles

Chapter 5       From rectangles to triangles and trapezoids

Chapter 6       Measuring volume: Structuring boxes

Chapter 7       Same shape, different measures

Chapter 8       Highlights of related research