Provoking the construction of a structure for coordinating n + 1 levels of units

• Teachers can provoke growth in students’ units coordination activity through appropriate tasks.
• Effective tasks involve multiple levels of units that allow for manipulation and reflection on activity.
• Results demonstrate the how cognitive neuroscience can inform mathematics education.

In considering mathematical development across multiple domains, researchers have implicated the critical role of an individual's ability to produce and coordinate units. Here, we describe a theoretically grounded instructional approach for promoting growth in units coordination. Our approach is informed by neuroscience, as well as existing research on units coordination. We present promising results from implementing our approach in a 10-week teaching experiment with a sixth-grade student named Cody. We demonstrate how, over the course of the 14 teaching sessions, Cody progressed from activity involving the coordination of two levels of units, to activity involving the coordination of three levels of units.