Mathematics

Through a composite counter-story from the perspective of fifth-grade Raza learners, the authors show how race and language play a role in the mathematics classroom.

The construct of active learning permeates undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but despite its prevalence, the construct means different things to different people, groups, and STEM domains. To better understand active learning, we constructed this review through an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration involving research teams from psychology and discipline-based education research (DBER).

The purpose of this study was to investigate fourth-grade students’ sensemaking of a word problem. Sensemaking occurs when students connect their understanding of situations with existing knowledge. We investigated students’ sensemaking through inductive task analysis of their strategies and solutions to a problem that involved determining the difference between two quantities and number of groups within the task. This analysis provided useful themes about students’ strategy use across the sensemaking domains.

The purpose of this study was to investigate fourth-grade students’ sensemaking of a word problem. Sensemaking occurs when students connect their understanding of situations with existing knowledge. We investigated students’ sensemaking through inductive task analysis of their strategies and solutions to a problem that involved determining the difference between two quantities and number of groups within the task. This analysis provided useful themes about students’ strategy use across the sensemaking domains.

This study explored how two professional development approaches to reforming math instruction with different mechanisms for fostering change might have valuable synergies when used in tandem to support take-up, i.e., teachers’ acceptance, adoption, and incorporation of ideas into practice. This investigation of Practice-Based Professional Development and Collaborative Lesson Design found that take-up was a recursive process that occurred across both PD types as teachers iteratively moved between building and deploying knowledge.

The Responsive Math Teaching project has been developing and refining a model for the development of mathematics instructional leadership in a network of 13 urban under-resourced elementary schools. The project is a research-practice partnership with Learning Network 2 in the School District of Philadelphia, a city where more than 80% of students live below federal poverty levels in a state with some of the largest gaps in the country between wealthy and poor districts. The RMT project is built around five core components:

The researchers conducted a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of school personnel and pre-service teachers about an Algebra I tutoring program for students with learning disabilities. The researchers surveyed and interviewed the participants about the effectiveness of the program for the mathematics learning of the students with LD at the school and as a learning experience for the pre-service teachers. The school personnel indicated there was a mutually beneficial relationship between the tutors and the school.

Flipped instruction, in which information typically conveyed through in-class lectures is delivered remotely through video or text, is being used increasingly by teachers at all levels. However, there is little research documenting how elementary teachers think about, plan for, and use flipped instruction. In this article, we use data from interviews, class observations, and an analysis of instructional videos to describe an elementary mathematics specialists' efforts to incorporate flipped instruction for mathematics in her fifth grade class.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has consistently emphasized the importance of curricular coherence in mathematics education. However, the predominance of the Internet has led to a lack of consistency in the use and quality of curricular materials. We drew on teachers’ self-report of their use of curriculum materials and conducted a Latent Class Analysis to examine patterns in 56 elementary teachers’ selection, use, and perceptions of materials for teaching mathematics, including the role that teacher expertise may play in these patterns.

Cohen, J., Wong, V., Krishnamachari, A., & Jones, N. (2021). Simulations as a platform for understanding and improving teachers' classroom skills. AAAS Arise Blog.