PME-NA 42 – Characterizing Coherence within Enacted Mathematics Lessons

Research brief report by Jaepil Han, Meghan Riling, Hector I. Nieves, Leslie Dietiker, and Rashmi Singh.

The importance of curricular coherence has been emphasized by leaders in mathematics education, who explain that coherence enhances deeper understanding by enabling students to see connections between mathematical ideas. Although there are different forms of curricular coherence in teaching and learning mathematics, the coherence within a lesson has received considerably less attention. In particular, little is known about what constitutes coherent lessons or how to measure the degree of coherence. Using lesson data from a larger study in which lessons are intentionally designed for coherence, we propose a tool for examining lesson coherence and describe characteristics of the lessons with different levels of coherence.