ABSTRACT
In this chapter we describe a coordinated program of intervention and research with elementary school children and their teachers. The focus of this work is on the long-term development of literacy in model-based reasoning, a form of symbolic communication that is particular to mathematics and science. Our emphasis on models follows from the observation that, regardless of their domain or specialization, scientists’ work involves building and refining models (Giere 1992; Stewart & Golubitsky, 1992).
