Fractions

Using Diagrams to Make Sense of Fraction Word Problems

I’ve been spending a lot of time in schools and classrooms these past two weeks using diagrams with students and teachers. As a result, I’ve been neglecting this blog but I’ve been learning so much. Hopefully, I’ll start making more time to write about what I’m doing. Here’s the latest problem I’ve been tackling with …

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Making Fractions Real: An RME Task

Recently, I’ve been investigating Realistic Math Education (RME).  I like the idea of building on what is real to the student. Because I spend a lot of time thinking about fractions, I wanted to know how RME approaches them.  Luckily, Streefland wrote about his three-year teaching experiment in the Netherlands. In the experiment, students were introduced to the “Fractured …

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5 reasons you should NOT talk about fractions as “out of”

One of the most common ways to introduce fractions to young students is to talk about ¾ as “3 out of 4.”   And it’s part of the reason why students have so much trouble with fractions later on. Researchers Siebert and Gaskin (2006) wrote about why introducing fractions as “3 out of 4” instead of “three-fourths” …

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