Hi.Nice project, building on research, your previous work, and developing teachers’ understanding? How do you help teachers to scaffold students’ progressions from hands-on experiences to more formal or symbolic representations of measurements?

This is very exciting. Earlier in the video a little child was working with a researcher, later you indicated that the project was implemented with 3rd and 4th grade students. Can you talk a little more about the age groups you are working with and how each age group is assisted to understand and develop through conceptualization of measurement?

Hi, Dr. Kulm! Haven’t communicated you in a while, thanks for writing. We use a lot of oral language at all levels, but especially in the earlier years. Then, we follow the classic reminder (Bob Davis, e.g.!) to ensure the first formal representations are recordings of what you do with manipulatives and pictures, rather than replacements of them.

This was, across two university sites (ISU and DU) a pre-K to 8th grade project!

Across all those ages, we worked on all three domains of geometric measurement. The way we worked with them is in our papers, and pretty complex to summarize here!

Thank you for posting this interesting video. I am curious if you have already produced or have plans to produce any practitioner-focused publications based on this work? That is, how educators can use what you’re learning about children’s measurement development in the classroom. I’m interested in early childhood STEM professional development and how best we could use information like what you have learned to support our teachers. Thanks!

Prof. Lange,
Thanks for the question about practitioner-focused publications based on this work. We are in the final stages of writing a book that includes activities to promote conceptual understanding of measurement across grades K to 5, with links to the Learning Trajectories research from this project. That is being published by NCTM. We hope it will come out this year!

More information about out project is available at: http://www.childrensmeasurement.org/

Hi Jeff et al.,

We watched your video with interest! One thing we were wondering about was your decision to present tasks with with computer simulations, especially the 3D tasks. Were there particular aspects of the environment that scaffolded students’ structuring of volume?

Andrew, Sybilla, and Torrey

Fascinating project! Thanks for sharing. You mentioned part of the project included offering 10 PD sessions to teachers. I’m curious if you received feedback from the teachers on the work and if/how the PD improved their instruction and student learning.

Thanks! Actually, the PD was an offshoot from this project. We used the results to inform the PD and we had 10 sessions specfically dedicated to measurement. We heard good things from the teachers and leaders in the district regarding their instruction and student learning. We’d love to follow up with observations and interviews, but that will have to wait.

This is very interesting! The snippet of teachers and students making the connection between measurement and geometry are priceless. Do you work with students at different K-12 levels?

For those interested in the “offshoot” Julie mentions, see the Dev-Te@m project at:

http://www.umich.edu/~devteam/