Mathematics

“Help! I’m stuck!” How many times have you heard a student make a similar plea? What do you consider when deciding how to respond? What reasoning is most productive? As part of a large research project, we explored these questions with 131 prospective and practicing teachers and found patterns in their reasoning. Consider how teachers and professional developers can use these patterns to better support children during problem solving.

Cullen, C. J., & Barrett, J. E., (2010) Strategy use indicative of an understanding of units of length. In M. Pinto & T. Kawasaki (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2, pp. 281-288. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.

Join the panelists from the plenary presentation to continue conversations about common
standards in each of the STEM disciplines.

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.