Season 3 | Episode 4 - Making Sense of Unitizing: The Theme That Runs Through Elementary Mathematics - Guest: Beth Hulbert

Beth Hulbert, Making Sense of Unitizing: The Theme That Runs Through Elementary Mathematics

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 4

During their elementary years, students grapple with many topics that involve relationships between different units. In fact, unitizing serves as a foundation for much of the mathematics students encounter during their elementary years. Today, we’re talking with Beth Hulbert from the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) about the ways educators can encourage unitizing in their classrooms.

BIOGRAPHY

Beth Hulbert is an independent consultant focused on mathematics curriculum, instruction, and assessment at the K–8 level. She has been involved in all aspects of the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) since its inception. Beth is coauthor of A Focus on Multiplication and Division: Bringing Research to the Classroom. The book was written to communicate how students develop their understanding of the concepts of multiplication and division.

RESOURCES

OGAP Website

OGAP Framework Documents

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Wallus: During their elementary years, students grapple with many topics that involve relationships between different units. This concept, called “unitizing,” serves as a foundation for much of the mathematics that students encounter during their elementary years. Today, we're talking with Beth Hulbert from the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) about the ways educators can encourage unitizing in their classrooms. 

Welcome to the podcast, Beth. We are really excited to talk with you today.

Beth Hulbert: Thanks. I'm really excited to be here.

Mike: I'm wondering if we can start with a fairly basic question: Can you explain OGAP and the mission of the organization?

Beth: Sure. So, OGAP stands for the Ongoing Assessment Project, and it started with a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop tools and resources for teachers to use in their classroom during math that were formative in nature. And we began with fractions. And the primary goal was to read, distill, and make the research accessible to classroom teachers, and at the same time develop tools and strategies that we could share with teachers that they could use to enhance whatever math program materials they were using. 

Essentially, we started by developing materials, but it turned into professional development because we realized teachers didn't have a lot of opportunity to think deeply about the content at the level they teach. The more we dug into that content, the more it became clear to us that content was complicated. It was complicated to understand, it was complicated to teach, and it was complicated to learn.

So, we started with fractions, and we expanded to do work in multiplicative reasoning and then additive reasoning and proportional reasoning. And those cover the vast majority of the critical content in K–8. And our professional development is really focused on helping teachers understand how to use formative assessment effectively in their classroom. But also, our other goals are to give teachers a deep understanding of the content and an understanding of the math ed research, and then some support and strategies for using whatever program materials they want to use. And we say all the time that we're a program blind — we don't have any skin in the game about what program people are using. We are more interested in making people really effective users of their math program.

Mike: I want to ask a quick follow-up to that.