Mathematics

Using student mathematical thinking during instruction is valued by the mathematics education community, yet practices surrounding such use remain difficult for teachers to enact well, particularly in the moment during whole-class instruction. Teachers’ orientations—their beliefs, values, and preferences—influence their actions, so one important aspect of understanding teachers’ use of student thinking as a resource is understanding their related orientations.

Informal best fit lines frequently appear in school curricula. Previous research collectively illustrates that the adjective informal does not translate to cognitive simplicity. Using existing literature, we create a hypothetical framework of cognitive processes associated with studying informal best fit lines. We refine the framework using data from a cycle of design-based research about building students’ understanding of covariation.

Case studies from the FAACT project.

Understand students’ fraction concepts through interview tasks.  Includes tasks and guide to record student thinking.

Documenting how students with learning disabilities (LD) initially conceive of fractional quantities, and how their understandings may align with or differ from students with mathematics difficulties, is necessary to guide development of assessments and interventions that attach to unique ways of thinking or inherent difficulties these students may face understanding fraction concepts. One way to characterize such conceptions is through the creation of a framework that depicts key understandings evidenced as students work with problematic situations.

Lynch, S., Hunt, J.H., & Lewis, K. (2018). Productive struggle for all: Differentiated instruction. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 24(4), 194-201.

Anticipating and responding to learner variability can make using talk moves complex. The authors fuse Universal Design for Learning (UDL), differentiation, and talk moves into three key planning and pedagogy considerations.

Hunt, J. H., MacDonald, B., Lambert, R., Sugita, T., & Silva, J. (2018). Think, pair, show, share to increase classroom discourse. Teaching Children Mathematics (Focus Issue-Invited contribution), 25(2), 80-84.

This study sheds light on three teaching competencies: Pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) professional noticing of student mathematical reasoning and strategies, their ability to assess the validity of student reasoning and strategies, and to select student strategy for class discussion. Our results reveal that PSTs with strong awareness of mathematically significant aspects of student reasoning and strategies (focused noticing) were better positioned to assess the validity of student reasoning and strategies.