ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 23

For quite a few adults, fractions were a stumbling block in their education, causing them to lose their footing and begin to doubt their ability to make sense of math. But this doesn't have to be the case for our students!

In this rerelease of an episode from Season 2, we're talking with Susan Empson, PhD, about big ideas in fractions and how we can make them more meaningful for our students.

BIOGRAPHY

Susan B. Empson is an emerita professor in the department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Missouri. She and Vicki Jacobs are currently collaborating on a National Science Foundation research grant to study elementary teachers' learning and development centered on teaching in ways that are responsive to children's mathematical thinking in the domain of rational numbers. Her research on children's thinking about fractions is the topic of her 2011 book, Extending Children's Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals (with co-author Linda Levi), and she has published widely in refereed journals, including Cognition and Instruction, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Teaching Children Mathematics, and Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. She has been a researcher of Cognitively Guided Instruction since 1989 and is a co-author of Children's Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction (1st and 2nd editions).

RESOURCES

Extending Children's Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals book by Susan B. Empson and Linda Levi

Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12 journal articles authored and co-authored by Susan Empson

TRANSCRIPT

Click here for a full episode transcript.