MIAA 340: Annotated bibliography

Alfinio, F. & Priewe, M. (2013, December). Orange you glad I didnt say fraction
division? Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 19, 288-293.
This article discusses the best practices for helping students understand fraction
division. The authors suggest focusing on two goals: first, letting students make
sense of division of fractions by using concrete and pictorial representations;
second, by helping students to gain a deeper understanding of multiplication of
fractions so they develop proportional thinking. Incorporating the title of the
article, the authors relate dividing an orange to dividing fractions as an example of
a concrete model of division of fractions. The authors encourage teachers to help
students to actively do mathematics instead of memorizing processes.
Cheng, I. (2010, August). Fractions: A new slant on slope. Mathematics Teaching in the
Middle School, 16, 35-41.
This article discusses the relationship between slope and fractions, and the authors
state that the understanding of one can help to better understand the other.
Students can use fractions as a slope to graph lines and use those lines to answer
questions involving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions
as well as comparing fractions and giving a rationale for finding common
denominators.
Dixon, J. & Tobias, T. (2013, October). The whole story: Understanding fraction
computation. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 19, 156-163.
The purpose of this article is to uncover issues that emerge when understanding
fraction operations is sought through presenting problems in context with the

MIAA 340: Annotated bibliography

stance that problems presented in real world context are more likely to be
understood and solved with confidence.
Matney, G. & Daugherty, B. (2013, October). Seeing spots and developing
multiplicative sense making. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 19,
148-155.
This article is about dot arrays and how they help students to understand deeper
math concepts. While working with dot arrays students will be able to decompose
numbers and problems and gain a deeper understanding of multiplication. This
will help them in higher math, including working with distributive property and
area.
Mulligan, J. & Michael M. (1997). Young childrens intuitive models of multiplication
and division. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28, 309-330.
A study was conducted to see if semantic structure of problems would change the
a group of grade 2 and 3 girls would solve problems. The conclusion was that of
the three intuitive models of multiplication (direct counting, repeated addition,
and multiplicative operations) and four intuitive models of division (direct
counting, repeated subtraction, repeated addition, and multiplicative operations)
were used by students to solve multiplication and division problems regardless of
the semantic structure of the problem.
Wagner, L. (2009, October). A worthwhile task to teach slope. Mathematics Teaching in
the Middle School, 15, 168-173.
This article relates slope to change, and suggests that students are often able to
determine the slope of the line as rise over run, but have difficulty applying

MIAA 340: Annotated bibliography

knowledge of slope in meaningful ways to the outside world or to deeper math
concepts. Students start to understand discrete patterns of change early in their
schooling when ordering numbers, and continue through in algebra with having
unknown inputs or outputs and having to determine a formula to fit their data. The
authors suggest that problems with real-life context are more meaningful and help
students to have a deep understanding better than tasks that simply ask students to
find a slope or an equation of a line that has no context.