9353587 Cobb The three-year project brings together issues concerning students' learning, teachers' activity, classroom interactions, and the nature of instructional activities. The primary focus is on the role that students' models of their informal mathematical problem solving play in supporting their transition to more formal yet personally-meaningful mathematical activity. As part of the investigation, particular attention is given to both small group work and to students' developing mathematical beliefs and values. The research involves a series of classroom teaching experiments conducted in collaboration with first, second, and third-grade teachers. The four instructional sequences used in these experiments each last six weeks and address arithmetical topics that are central to elementary school mathematics. The analysis of classroom video-recordings and children's written work coordinates cognitive and social perspectives to clarify the role that models can play both in individual learning and in classroom communication. The findings have immediate implications for the design of mathematical learning environments that are consistent with current reform recommendations. Further, the four instructional sequences that will be revised in the course of the research are designed to all innovative teachers the so-called basics via communications, reasoning, and problem solving. ***
