2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
How are high school teachers helping their students reason abstractly and quantitatively?
How can students be helped to:
- make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations?
- decontextualize — to abstract a given situation?
- represent a problem symbolically?
- manipulate the representing symbols as if they have a life of their own?
The CCSS states:
Quantitative reasoning entails habits of creating a coherent representation of the problem at hand; considering the units involved; attending to the meaning of quantities, not just how to compute them; and knowing and flexibly using different properties of operations and objects.
What are you doing to help students develop this practice? What makes it hard? What challenges are you encountering?