How teachers make connections among ideas in mathematics instruction

Conceptual understanding involves understanding connections among ideas within a domain. In this chapter, we consider how teachers support students in learning about connections among ideas in mathematics. We review research focusing on teachers' connection making in mathematics classrooms, and we consider several dimensions of variability in that connection making. Across three corpora of lessons that varied in students' grade levels (first grade to college), cultural settings (United States and China), and mathematics content, we found that all teachers produced linking episodes, but the frequency with which they did so varied substantially, raising new questions about the sources and consequences of that variability. Teachers of first-grade students in China routinely engaged their students in co-constructing links; teachers of middle schoolers and college students in the United States typically explained links to students. Linking episodes targeted many different types of connections, including connections between representations, connections between principles and exemplars, connections between procedures and concepts, and connections between concepts and real-world instantiations. Across all three corpora, teachers expressed linked ideas multimodally in a majority of linking episodes. Based on the findings, we present several hypotheses about how teacher behaviors may support students' understanding of connections among ideas, and we suggest directions for future work.