The Modeling with Data Casebook was developed as the key resource for participants’ Developing Mathematical Ideas seminar experience. The twenty-eight cases, written by teachers describing real situations and actual student thinking in their classrooms, provide the basis of each session’s investigation of specific mathematical concepts and teaching strategies.

Reading and discussing the cases under the guidance of the facilitator actively engages participants in their own learning enterprise as they—
• learn to recognize the key mathematical ideas with which students are grappling;
• consider the types of classroom settings and teaching strategies that support the development of student understanding;
• become aware of how core mathematical ideas develop across the grades;
• work on mathematical concepts and gain better understanding of mathematical content;
• deepen their own understanding of the Common Core standards for mathematical practice and how to engage their students in them; and
• discover how to continue learning about children and mathematics.


The casebook is composed of eight chapters: the first seven consist of classroom cases spanning the elementary grades; chapter 8 is an essay providing an overview of the research related to the situations described in the first seven chapters. The chapters are as follows:
Chapter 1 Getting started with data
Chapter 2 Designing a data investigation: What do you want to find out?
Chapter 3 Categorical data: Representing and describing the results
Chapter 4 Numerical data: What do the numbers mean?
Chapter 5 Comparing data sets
Chapter 6 Average: Developing ideas about “middle”
Chapter 7 Average: Understanding the mean
Chapter 8 Highlights of related research