A Commentary on Instructional Design

As we hope for the students of the stats project class, every task has its lessons. My task has been to find a way of speaking across this special issue of immensely detailed reports devoted to the analysis of a highly disciplined project of instructional design in math education. Of all things, the detail stands out, both the naturalistic detail of the stats project and its classroom records, and the detail of the conceptual-analytic distinctions and refined conjectures that we find in the collected articles. There are multiple analytic programs and complex architectures across the contributions to this special issue, and they are all about math education. It was a challenge for one whose credentials in math are long gone, and no doubt there is much I have missed. On the other hand, if we can ever parley a deficit into a modest virtue, it also may mean that I have found this special issue much as an interested, but none-too-expert reader might. This commentary is thus a reader's exercise and has come to entail taking an interest in the materials in ways that the designers and authors may not have intended. Let me begin with the purpose and format of this special issue. I am not certain of the specific instructions delivered to the contributors, but the evident shape of the issue is that of a collective address to a same corpus of materials, in the particulars of the stats project class. The seriousness of the project, its history, purposes, preparations, development, and execution, are nicely and effectively captured in the Appendix by Kay McClain. We find further insights in the contribution of Paul Cobb and in the second contribution of Kay McClain. Their histories with the project's design and implementation informed their analyses of what the materials show us about "mathematical learning in the classroom community" (Cobb, 2002/this issue). McClain offered a distinctively professional field of view in her analysis of the records as records of her own professional work and how analytic and design distinctions can become elusive things in the welter of classroom teach-

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