This symposium brings together three current NSF-funded projects that use constructivist perspectives to investigate extensions of multiplicative reasoning beyond whole numbers. The projects differ in the variants of constructivist perspectives they use, the populations they study, and the mathematical topics they choose. The perspectives include variants of radical constructivism and knowledge-in-pieces. The populations include elementary students, middle grades students, and preservice teachers. The topics include fraction multiplication, multiplicative relationships between quantitative unknowns, and proportional relationships between co-varying quantities. Comparing insights across projects will advance and broaden our understanding of what might be involved in teaching and learning core upper elementary and middle grades content in ways that take into account how learners’ prior knowledge both supports and constrains extensions of multiplicative reasoning beyond whole numbers.

Session Type: Research Symposium