Test your pupils' reasoning skills with several activities and a quick mystery to solve. Learners watch and analyze a few video clips that demonstrate reasoning in action, practice deduction with an interactive and collaborative...

Is Sherlock Holmes an inductivist or a deductivist? Users of this interactive to distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning. They consider in various situations whether it is better to list evidence and then introduce a claim...

The learner puts reasoning and estimation to work. The directions are to place a decimal in the answer to make the equation true. Pupils are to look at the two problems, one multiplication and one division, and estimate an answer. No...

Whodunnit? Find out who killed Mr. Brooks through a logical examination of evidence. Class members fill out a couple of data tables to help them pin down the suspect. After they've figured out just who the culprit is, pupils compose...

This a fun problem for young geometers to play with while gaining important insight into deductive reasoning. Some will find the answers very quickly, others might take a less direct path, but all will use their knowledge of the sum of...

"Go West, young man!" is a familiar refrain in American history. But why did people leave their homes in the East to travel westward and what impact did that movement have on people already living in the American West? By examining...

  Your archaeologists combine proportional reasoning with exponential functions in a real-life task centered on Carbon 14 dating.          

Strive to determine your stride. Scholars first view an informative video on the Kentucky Horse Park and the 28-feet stride of the Man o' War. They then work together in groups to find the length of their own strides by using the number...

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher helps bring difficult, but important, topics such as suicide and bullying into the classroom. An educator's guide for the novel provides activities and discussion questions to help teens explore the...

Help your class make sense of quantities and their relationships. Given is the product of two numbers. It is up to your number crunchers to think about the quantitative relationship when the product is one-tenth or ten times the product...

Four simple equations, each with two variables, try to get at the important question of reasoning about equations. The problem isn't to solve the equations, but to understand the nature of their solutions. These equations address the...

Twenty-one pieces of tagboard can lead your class to a greater understanding of integers when you use them to form a human number line. After creating this math tool, two strategies for adding and subtracting will have your...

When will the gender wage gap disappear? Scholars use a provided infographic to see trends in wage gap over time. They use ratios of women's wages to men's wages to determine which decades had the greatest change in the wage gap. The...

Mathematical reasoning and linear systems are two of the strategies used to solve this number puzzle. Your learners will enjoy the challenge and the variety of ways to approach this challenge.

This collaborative activity investigates the meaning of a trapezoid and a parallelogram. It begins by presenting two different definitions of a trapezoid. Learners are to reason abstractly the difference between the two definitions and...

Compare two different proportional relationships on a graph. It is up to your mathematicians to determine which of two moving objects have greater speed. A good example of a Common Core multiple choice question. 

Your mathematician's job is to explore the relationship between hours and miles walked during a walk-a-thon. The activity compels your learners to experiment with different means in finding out this proportional relationship. The answer...

When more basketball players are taller than field hockey players at a school, is it safe to say that in general they are always taller? The activity takes data from two college teams and your learners will be able to answer questions...

When comparing groups of objects, it's easy for children to identify which has more, but it's not so easy for them to explain their reasoning. This simple whole-group activity provides multiple opportunities for learners to compare...

Stay on track to learn about proportions. Scholars watch an introductory video that shows the split time for a runner on an outdoor track. Applying concepts of proportional reasoning, they determine what the runner's split time would be...

Give a round of applause for completing the task. Scholars watch a video that shows an extremely fast clapper and a timer. The activity requires applying concepts of rates and proportional reasoning to estimate the number of claps in one...

Teach solving absolute value inequalities through inquiry. Groups use their knowledge of absolute value and solving inequalities to find a solution set to an absolute value inequality. Working collaboratively encourages discussion,...

The object is to model fraction division by asking “How many are in one group?” It is a difficult concept to understand, but developing the model that shows one cup to a certain amount of container or one container to a certain amount of...

Examine the origin and application of pi in five different levels. The five lessons in the resource begin with an analysis of the relationship between the radius and circumference of a circle. The following lessons lead learners through...