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ERIC Number: EJ1035910
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014-Mar
Pages: 8
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1072-0839
EISSN: N/A
Problem Solve with Presidential Data
Patterson, Lynn G.; Patterson, Kadie L.
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, v19 n7 p406-413 Mar 2014
Motivating middle school students to learn can be challenging. One proven method for doing so is through an integrated curriculum. Educational philosophers and curriculum theorists have long noted the benefits of an integrated curriculum, which recognizes that the subject areas within the curriculum are connected to one another and to the real world. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) has argued that a school curriculum needs to be integrated to help adolescents make sense of life experience and connect school experience to their lives outside the classroom. A recently documented example of this integrated curriculum style of teaching occurred in an interdisciplinary activity that connected mathematics and art from the Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia. In that experience, the teachers reported that mathematics teachers were able to enthusiastically engage seventh-grade and eighth-grade students in an interdisciplinary activity focused on scaling, proportional reasoning, and measurement by recreating artwork from a famous private collection. This experience combined art and mathematics into motivating lessons for middle school students. Curriculum integration is often achieved through the design of integrated thematic units or the study of a specific topic. In this article, the authors sought to integrate social studies and mathematics through the development of this activity. They focused their lesson on the average age of a president at his inauguration and featured the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) content area of statistics and probability (CCSSI 2010).
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 1906 Association Drive, Reston, VA 20191-1502. Tel: 800-235-7566; Tel: 703-620-3702; Fax: 703-476-2970; e-mail: orders@nctm.org; Web site: http://www.nctm.org/publications/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive; Guides - Classroom - Teacher
Education Level: Middle Schools; Secondary Education; Junior High Schools; Grade 7; Elementary Education; Grade 8
Audience: Teachers
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A