MP 7: Look for and Make Use

of Structure

What should we consider first?

How will these resources help?

These video examples and articles depict classroom experiences of students engaged in Practice Standard 7. They provide suggestions for how to guide students towards the discovery of structure so that they may use that structure to expand a pattern, read or complete a graph, classify geometric shapes, or build a sense of number, operations, and place value through structural models.
 

The importance of Visual Learning

In order to identify the structure of a mathematical problem, students often need to engage in some form of visual learning or visualization. In early algebra this may mean that students are making a pattern or displaying data in a table to determine where a pattern exists. Structures are used to build place value and number sense. Students use various models in order to understand numbers and how they can be composed and decomposed. With data analysis and statistics students use the structure of the graph or other data presentation to make sense of the problem and find a solution. It is therefore essential that students learn multiple ways to represent and analyze data, numbers, and shapes in order to determine and understand the structure of any problem.