Rethinking the Teaching and Learning of Area Measurement

Abstract

This study focused on exploring an innovative way of teaching and learning measurement, what we refer to as Dynamic Measurement or DYME. Without relying on the common approach of counting square units, our goal was to engage students in contextually rich digital dynamic tasks to visualize area as a continuous quantity and evaluate the area of a rectangular region as a multiplicative relationship between the two lengths of the sides. In this paper, we briefly describe the iterative process of designing, testing and refining the tasks for DYME pointing to the significance of the design for developing students' thinking of area as length times width.