In this article, Lindsey Fowler describes how an animal rhyme--that she shared with her fifth-grade students with the intention of assisting them with the concept of metric conversions--made fostering the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) more difficult. The addition of animals, which added an extraneous element that students mistakenly…

Australia has used SI metric units for measurement for decades now, although the conversion of measurements from the earlier Imperial units--known as metrication--commenced subsequently in 1971, and was not completed until 1988. All Primary and Secondary schools were using only metric units in school lessons by 1973, and it became illegal to teach…

This paper reports results of a design experiment regarding young children's concepts of mass measurement. The research built on an earlier study in which a framework of "growth points" in early mathematics learning and a related, task-based, one-to-one interview to assess children's understanding of the measurement of mass…

March 14 is special because it is Pi Day. Mathematics is celebrated on that day because the date, 3-14, replicates the first three digits of pi. Pi-related songs, websites, trivia facts, and more are at the fingertips of interested teachers and students. Less celebrated, but still fairly well known, is National Metric Day, which falls on October…

Constructing model hot air balloons is an activity that captures the imaginations of students, enabling teachers to present required content to minds that are open to receive it. Additionally, there are few activities that lend themselves to integrating so much content across subject areas. In this article, the authors describe how they have…

We describe a principled way of imposing a metric representing dissimilarities on any discrete set of stimuli (symbols, handwritings, consumer products, X-ray films, etc.), given the probabilities with which they are discriminated from each other by a perceiving system, such as an organism, person, group of experts, neuronal structure, technical…