Mathematics

The goal of this study is to assess the educational, career, and social impacts of disseminating an innovative technology, the XO laptop computer, to minority 4th and 5th grade students in Birmingham City Schools (BCS) in Alabama. This is the largest XO dissemination in the U.S. and the first XO dissemination project to distribute XO laptops to all 1st – 5th grade students in a U.S. school district.

The goal of this study is to assess the educational, career, and social impacts of disseminating an innovative technology, the XO laptop computer, to minority 4th and 5th grade students in Birmingham City Schools (BCS) in Alabama. This is the largest XO dissemination in the U.S. and the first XO dissemination project to distribute XO laptops to all 1st – 5th grade students in a U.S. school district.

As part of the Data Games project, we are researching how students record and organize multivariate data. This research is informing the design of new software interfaces for Fathom and TinkerPlots that will allow students to explore and understand data that live in other than "flat" data structures — the structures that most software tools currently limit themselves to.
We have designed the Traffic Problem to explore the following questions:
1. What methods do novices and experts use to sytematically record data with multiple attributes?
2. In recording data, do students employ a recognizable notion of “case?"

With our conceptualization of Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, we draw attention to immanent experience and read transcendent discursive practices through the moment of interaction. We use a series of spatial images as metaphors to analyze the way positioning is conceptualized in current mathematics education literature and the way it may be alternatively conceptualized. This leads us to claim that changing the way mathematics is talked about and changing the stories (or myths) told about mathematics is necessary for efforts to change the way mathematics is done and the way it is taught.

How important is discourse in the mathematics classroom? Interest in this question has grown dramatically as mathematics education has recognized the role of communication in understanding. This book presents portraits of teaching by secondary school teachers who have closely observed classroom communication, conversation, and discourse and have sought to use them to improve the quality of their teaching and their students' learning.

In this session, participants discuss knowledge synthesis in process regarding STEM teachers’ participation in professional learning communities: What have we learned and what are the implications for other NSF projects?