Reply To: Lesson 2 – Absolute Thinking vs. Relative Thinking – Discussion

[Lavon Heath]

I took a PD course last year that mentioned additive vs. multiplicative thinking, but I didn’t really conceptualize the difference. Seeing your examples helped me to understand that. In fact, I was able to reflect back on students I have taught who still divided in 6th grade by counting by 1’s rather than groups and see that they hadn’t made that leap past additive thinking. What would you do to help those students?

Also, I currently teach 8th grade math but have so many students who can’t reduce fractions to their simplest form. I had never identified that as a lack of ability to reason with proportions. I hope that I am able to get some more resources to stimulate this kind of thinking.