Big Ideas in Mathematics: Exploring the Dimensionality of Big Ideas in School Mathematics

Big Ideas in school mathematics can be seen as overarching concepts that occur in various mathematical topics in a syllabus. For teachers, this knowledge can be used to help students develop a better understanding of mathematics by making visible the central ideas, and connection across topics and across levels. For students, this knowledge can further be helpful affectively by engendering an appreciation of mathematics as a subject that is coherent and comprehensible. Although there has been much interest recently in the understanding of Big Ideas, there is little research done in the assessment of Big Ideas thinking. In this paper, we discuss our development of an instrument to measure the Big Ideas of equivalence and proportionality. Our analysis of some pilot items suggests that Big Idea thinking is a multidimensional construct within most school environments.