Mathematics

This session provides a forum for discussion around issues of alignment between programs, their learning goals, and the measures for assessing program effectiveness. The session seeks to offer ideas and strategies on how to tackle these kinds of issues.

The session addresses a common challenge in research—the tension between the need for using existing measures to ensure that research results can be compared across studies and the need for using measures that are well-aligned with a program’s learning goals to assess treatment effects.

This session explores the role of funding programs in shaping research agendas through deliberate and targeted funding for priority areas. With the English language learner (ELL) population in U.S. schools on the rise and a growing demand for expansion and development of STEM education, intersecting research in these two fields represents an important effort to address pressing issues in U.S. schools and the STEM workforce.

The goal of this session is to assist other project teams in the design and testing of game-based mathematics products. The session includes a discussion of recently completed randomized control trials of the Math Snacks games. Participants leave with concrete ideas on designing and testing e-learning products designed for classroom use with a focus on middle school concepts.

The LAMP project has developed a sequence of lessons in a hypothetical learning trajectory that targets students’ ability to write viable arguments in algebraic contexts. Most of the lessons encourage students to produce a referent (e.g., variable expression or equation, generic example, diagram) as the foundation of their argument. Students come to the lessons with a predisposition for example production in support of their claims and to augment arguments.

Algebraic habits of mind, at the core of five of the Standards for Mathematical Practice, become both a potent and appealing intervention for at-risk algebra students and a solid prevention-model middle-school course either to accelerate algebra or to ensure success in a later algebra course. The session focuses on the habits of mind in that context, in related professional development work that addresses the Standards for Mathematical Practices, and on assessment of algebraic habits of mind in teachers.

Over a period of five years the SmartGraphs project developed HTML5 software for teaching and learning STEM subjects that make use of line graphs and scatter plots. SmartGraphs activities help students understand the “story” represented by a graph. The project created dozens of activities for algebra, physical science, and other STEM subjects, as well as an authoring system allowing non-computer-programmers to create and disseminate free online activities.

DR K–12 projects have been funded to conduct (1) activities and develop materials that are beneficial to the STEM education community (teachers and students) and (2) education research to ensure continuous improvement of these activities and materials.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) offer an opportunity for districts to push teachers to enact ambitious practices around instruction and curriculum use. However, taking up ambitious practices entails a number of challenges, some of which were evident during the NCTM Standards reform movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, and some of which reflect new approaches and new policy contexts.

The main goal of this session is to share and get feedback on materials from a 40-hour professional development program for elementary mathematics, focusing in particular on the organization of facilitation supports included in these materials. The PD was designed to help teachers promote discourse in elementary mathematics classrooms. In particular, it defines and helps teachers implement “responsive” discourse in the classroom, that is, discourse in which all students are responsible for learning and engaged in probing each other’s mathematical ideas.