
Discipline: Mathematics
Copyright: 2025
Grade(s): 3 - 4
Delivery Method: Print
Imprint: Pearson Canada
Author(s): Alex Lawson, Heather Wark, Melanie Biesenthal
What to Look For: Understanding and Developing Student Thinking in Multiplicative Reasoning
Although not always obvious, multiplicative reasoning is foundational to much of the junior mathematics curriculum—fractions and coding as examples—in addition to multiplication and division. Building a solid foundation to develop this reasoning, one that will meet the needs of a wide range of students, requires a carefully designed developmental pathway.
What to Look For 2: Understanding and Developing Student Thinking in Multiplicative Reasoning provides you with this pathway. It is a comprehensive package—student and classroom videos, a continuum, fully developed and field-tested lessons with supporting material—everything you need to teach multiplicative reasoning in late primary and early junior years.

About What to Look For 2
This resource begins where What to Look For: Understanding and Developing Student Thinking in Early Numeracy left off. In What to Look For 2, you’ll find shared aspects from this best-selling resource—a research-based continuum and videos anchored to and illustrating key ideas students are building and strategies they are using, as main examples.
What’s new in this resource is a series of comprehensive lessons grounded in recent local and international research on effective development of multiplicative reasoning and its importance in foundational math learning. Each lesson is accompanied by everything you need to deliver in your classroom—sample dialogue, notes, annotated student samples, what to look fors, and classroom videos.
About the Companion Website
The What to Look For 2 companion website contains all the elements you need to use the book’s lessons. Material is organized in these buckets:

About This Resource
- User’s Guide
- What to Look For 2 Continuum with narrated student videos
- Authors’ how-to videos
- Glossary of common terms
Lesson Resources
- Digital versions of text pages—useful for in-the-moment teaching
- 24 Classroom videos that illustrate points in students’ thinking and learning
- 38 Narrated student videos tied to the continuum
- Notebook files
- Line masters
Additional Resources
- Practice ideas and problems
- Additional lessons
- Game suggestions
- Curriculum correlations
- Appendices