Partnering with Principals Through Formal and Informal Professional Development

Mathematics Specialists and administrators need to define what they should see students and teachers doing in classrooms that promote proficiency and understanding in mathematics. Formal, divisionwide professional development on this topic can quickly guide and inform a large group of administrators in one setting. However, potentially more powerful professional development can occur on a small scale one building at a time through mathematics department learning walks

Assessing Creativity: A Test for Drawing Production using Digital Art Tools The concept, application and assessment of digital art teaching as a means of enhancing creative proficiency

This paper describes the Test for Creative Thinking - Drawing Production (TCT-DP), including its design, concept and mode of assessment, and the practical consequences of its application in a specific context. The test was used to evaluate the performance of groups of students as part of a case study exploring the use of digital art tools for drawing in a junior school. The students used specific digital art software via both computers and tablets, and also drew manually using a variety of devices. TCP-DP evaluates drawing production by means of a set of 14 criteria. At the same time, this study used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) theory to assess the ease of use and usefulness of the digital tools. The test was trialled with students aged 9-10 years in different ability groups. There were no significant differences in performance between male and female participants. Details of various related studies, together with data concerning the reliability and validity of the TCT-DP test, are also provided. The study finds that motivation is an important factor in improving young people’s artistic ability

Rich environments for active learning: a definition

Rich Environments for Active Learning, or REALs, are comprehensive instructional systems that evolve from and are consistent with constructivist philosophies and theories. To embody a constructivist view of learning, REALs: promote study and investigation within authentic contexts; encourage the growth of student responsibility, initiative, decision making, and intentional learning; cultivate collaboration among students and teachers; utilize dynamic, interdisciplinary, generative learning activities that promote higher-order thinking processes to help students develop rich and complex knowledge structures; and assess student progress in content and learning-to-learn within authentic contexts using realistic tasks and performances. REALs provide learning activities that engage students in a continuous collaborative process of building and reshaping understanding as a natural consequence of their experiences and interactions within learning environments that authentically reflect the world around them. In this way, REALs are a response to educational practices that promote the development of inert knowledge, such as conventional teacher-to-student knowledge-transfer activities. In this article, we describe and organize the shared elements of REALs, including the theoretical foundations and instructional strategies to provide a common ground for discussion. We compare existing assumptions underlying education with new assumptions that promote problem-solving and higher-level thinking. Next, we examine the theoretical foundation that supports these new assumptions. Finally, we describe how REALs promote these new assumptions within a constructivist framework, defining each REAL attribute and providing supporting examples of REAL strategies in action

Effects of Movement, Growth Mindset and Math Talks on Math Anxiety

Mathematical anxiety is prevalent in our schools. This research provides insight into how mathematical anxiety develops and how it affects students throughout their lives. This study focuses on the mathematical anxiety and mathematical self-concept of five second grade classes at an economically disadvantaged school in rural North Texas. The study looked to see if adding the interventions of movement, mathematical growth mindset and math talks to a classroom would improve the mathematical self-concept of the children in the classrooms which participated. The study contained three classrooms of students who participated in the interventions and two classrooms which were used as a control group. All five second grade classrooms completed a pre and post-intervention survey of mathematical self-concepts. The three main categories measured by the survey were math self-concept, comfort using different mathematical strategies and comfort level with discussing and using math concepts in front of peers. The children received mathematical movement lessons on Mondays, growth mindset journaling and discussions on Tuesdays and mental math number talks on Wednesdays. After the four-week study, the results showed an overall gain in positive responses for the three categories, which were measured for this study in the intervention group. The control group did not show as much of a positive gain as the intervention group did, and in some cases actually went down in positive responses

Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

A systematic review of pedagogical approaches that can effectively include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms with a particular focus on peer group interactive approaches

The broad background to this review is a long history of concepts of special pupils and special education, and a faith in special pedagogical approaches. The rise of inclusive schools and some important critiques of special pedagogy (e.g. Hart, 1996; Norwich and Lewis, 2001; Thomas and Loxley, 2001) have raised the profile of teaching approaches that ordinary teachers can and do use to include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms. Inclusive education itself is increasingly conceived as being about the quality of learning and participation that goes on in inclusive schools rather than simplistic matters of where children are place

The Impact of Regular Number Talks on Mental Math Computation Abilities

The purpose of our research was to determine what impact participating in regular number talks, informal conversations focusing on mental mathematics strategies, had on elementary students’ mental mathematics abilities. The research was conducted in two urban fourth grade classrooms over a two month period. The data sources included a pre- and post-questionnaire, surveys about students’ attitudes towards mental math, a pretest and a posttest containing addition and subtraction problems to be solved mentally, teacher reflective journals, and student interviews. The results of our research indicate that participating consistently in number talks had a positive effect on students’ mental mathematics abilities and the problem solving strategies they were able to articulate. Recommendations based on the results of the investigation include adopting brief number talks as an essential component of elementary mathematics curricula, thus allowing students many opportunities to solve problems mentally and to discuss their reasoning