The Modeling with Data Casebook was developed as the key resource for participants’ Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar experience. The twenty-eight cases, written by teachers describing real situations and actual student thinking in their classrooms, provide the basis of each session’s exploration of using data to model real-world contexts by collecting, representing, describing, and interpreting data.

Reading and discussing the cases under the guidance of the facilitator actively engages participants in their own learning enterprise as they—

• learn to recognize the key mathematical ideas with which students are grappling;
• consider the types of classroom settings and teaching strategies that support the development of student understanding;
• become aware of how core mathematical ideas develop across the grades;
• work on mathematical concepts and gain better understanding of mathematical content;
• deepen their own understanding of the Common Core standards for mathematical practice and how to engage their students in them; and
• discover how to continue learning about children and mathematics.

The casebook is composed of eight chapters: the first seven consist of classroom cases spanning the elementary grades; chapter 8 is an essay providing an overview of the research related to the situations described in the first seven chapters. The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1       Getting started with data

Chapter 2       Designing a data investigation: What do you want to find out?

Chapter 3       Categorical data: Representing and describing the results

Chapter 4       Numerical data: What do the numbers mean?

Chapter 5       Comparing data sets

Chapter 6       Average: Developing ideas about “middle”

Chapter 7       Average: Understanding the mean

Chapter 8       Highlights of related research