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The new Ontario mathematics curriculum for elementary students has recently been released. A first step for those responsible for mathematics education in Grades 1-8 is to examine this curriculum to consider what might be new and different. There are some obvious differences that will be noticed on first inspection, such as the social-emotional learning skills at the start of the curriculum that emphasize students developing a sense of themselves as mathematics learners and establishing their mathematical well-being. At a surface level, you will notice the strand name changes, the combining of some strands, and the addition of the Financial Literacy strand. In digging deeper, one will notice such things as some differences in the approach to fractions, changes in developing algebraic thinking, an emphasis on helping students navigate representations of data in addition to creating their own representations of data, the explicit introduction of coding, an integration of geometry, location, movement, and measurement in developing spatial reasoning, etc. Another addition to the curriculum is mathematical modelling, which is the focus of this article.
There is one overall expectation that spans all Grades 1-8 related to mathematical modelling in the Ontario curriculum. Furthermore, there are no specific curriculum expectations associated with it. I suspect that the reason that the overall expectation is the same across all grades, is that students at all grade levels can engage in the mathematical modelling process. The tasks or issues that students will be modelling may differ across the grades or, in some cases, the same task could be used across several grades, with students developing different approaches, depending on their mathematical toolkit. In terms of having no specific expectations, the modelling process is iterative and cyclical and cannot necessarily be broken down into distinct components or skills, but must be viewed as a whole, hence the overall expectation keeps the process intact. So, let's talk about what this mathematical process looks like, and what tasks across the grades might make sense.
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