Kaleidoscopic View of Voices Shaping Female and Male Adolescents\u27 Dynamic Mathematics Identity within Single-Sex and Coeducational Environments

With amendments made to the Title IX legislation in 2006, public schools in the United States were permitted to establish single-sex classes as an option for students to enroll voluntarily. Yet, our understanding of how single-sex mathematics classes affect female and male adolescent students in the United States is sparse. The purpose of this study is to contribute to this limited body of scholarship by gaining insights into the similarities and differences in how middle grade female and male students\u27 narrate their mathematics identity within a single-sex and coeducational mathematics classrooms, as well as how class type may be shaping these adolescents\u27 mathematics identity. Grounded in the theoretical work of Gilligan (1982), Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Evans (2008), students\u27 mathematics identities were understood as being composed of an interplay of \u27voices,\u27 voices vying for audibility (Evans, 2008), and moving in and out of one another while simultaneously shaping each participant\u27s mathematics identity, similar to that viewed at the opening end of a kaleidoscope. Results support the notion that mathematics identity is a complex and individualistic construct. Yet, in considering participants\u27 voices as distinct entities, it appears as though they are more similar than different. But participants in this study must make sense of their multiple voices, their mathematics identity, within the broader context of society and the classroom setting, external influences shaping how they perceive and narrate themselves as mathematics students. One such factor is the class type (single-sex or coeducational), which appears to be shaping some of the participants\u27 mathematics identity in this study

Making the Invisible Visible: Affordances and Hindrances of Using Tangible Objects in Identity Research

The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight the role of tangible objects (i.e., rings) in understanding individual’s STEM identity, which in this study is defined as an interdisciplinary belief that an individual has about her or himself regarding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The rings allowed participants to position themselves within STEM disciplines and to further illustrate and narrate this position through the various ring sizes, and for some, the spatial arrangement of the rings. However, the use of the rings seemed to limit participants to describing who they are within STEM in the moment, as well as not providing an opportunity to illustrate how micro- and macro-level external forces shaped their identity

School Climate and Building Highly Effective Schools: How Student Perception of School Structure and Supportive Learning Environments Affect Their Enjoyment of School

Education reformers have long sought to apply scientific framework analysis to engineer the ideal system in which both students and teachers are highly successful. Grounded in the evidence based theoretical framework of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), many academicians and practitioners are now focusing on determinants of school structure and supportive learning environments to bolster students’ enjoyment of school, which supports increased positive outcomes. The Abbreviated School Climate Survey (Student Version) (Ding, Liu and Berkowitz, 2011) instrument was designed to explore student perspective of school climate as an indicator of student outcomes based on seven variables. The purpose of this study was to determine how the construct of Structured Supportive Environment correlates to students’ enjoyment of school, using the seven-factor variables of the Abbreviated School Climate Survey, in a sample of two (2) traditional and two (2) charter public middle schools in Missouri (N=729). Using Structured Equation Modeling, the analysis demonstrated a strong positive correlation of the measured factors on enjoyment of school, thus supporting the reliability and validity of the Abbreviated School Climate Survey in measuring and predicting the effect of students’ perceptions of school climate factors on outcomes. Given the strong correlation of these school climate factors—both organizational and socioemotional—on student outcomes, it should be these factors, rather than discrete standardized test scores, that should drive education policy and assessment of school quality. Future studies could use this instrument to measure the effect of school climate factors on student outcomes, including academic, social and economic aspects

Connecting Play to STEM Concepts, Practices and Processes: Review of Research on Play within STEM Learning Environments (publication in fourth edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education)

As play is diminishing and the need to prepare students to enter the STEM workforce is rising, we conducted a literature review to examine how play in STEM learning environments may address issues in STEM, and conversely, how STEM learning environments can be framed as a context for human development through play. Findings highlight the value of all types of play for development within STEM across a range of learning environments. Yet, the scholarship seems to point to adults as vital to the play STEM learning environment as they provide connections between play and STEM concepts, practices and processes

Makers Do Math! Legitimizing Informal Mathematical Practices Within Making Contexts

In this paper, we argue that making activities within non-formal learning environments (e.g., museums, libraries) provide opportunities to engage youth in what we define as mathematical practices for making, everyday mathematical practices within the context of making activities. The mathematical practices identified from two non-formal school-based contexts highlighted three mathematical practices for making: informal measurement, spatial reasoning, and curiosity. These practices are identified in prior scholarship as being beneficial and foundational for the understanding of mathematical concepts. As educators and researchers turn to non-formal and informal contexts, with an eye toward understanding ways youth engage in the activity of making, descriptions of mathematical practices for making build upon prior everyday mathematical practices and open up a new landscape of inquiry

Member Checking Process with Adolescent Students: Not Just Reading a Transcript

This paper explores the way in which educational researchers created a member checking process with adolescent students during a study to uncover and understand female and male’s dynamic mathematics identity in single-sex and coeducational mathematics classes within a public coeducational middle school in the United States. The authors developed a member checking process that included I-poems and Word Trees, which provided the youth with opportunities for self-reflection, enhancement of findings, examination of the students’ learning, and as a way to shift some of the power from the researcher to the participants. This paper serves as an example for other researchers to begin thinking about the important process of member checking and participants’ roles in the research

Children’s Engineering Identity Development Within an At-Home Engineering Program During COVID-19

The culture of engineering and the culture of formal learning environments often make it difficult for individuals to develop an engineering identity. Conversely, recent research points to the home environment as an alternative setting to support disciplinespecific identity development of children, while less is known regarding the identity development of children as engineers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the development of children’s engineering identity through the co-creation of engineering concepts and engagement with engineering design thinking and processes with family members in home environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted interviews with nine families—nine parents and 13 children in Grades 3–6. Analysis of the interviews highlighted how situational interest, recognition, self-efficacy, and doing engineering shaped and informed children’s developing identity. For example, child participants expressed heightened situational interest in the engineering design process and various genres of engineering, with some self-identifying as a particular type of engineer based on their interests. Some expressed greater interest in utilizing engineering practices and processes in the future, either as a career or as a hobby. As another finding, child participants discursively enacted and behaved as engineers through their experiences with collaboration, failure, and perseverance. Concurrently, parent participants articulated their child(ren)’s developing engineering identity, particularly in how their children conducted new processes and modeled the thinking and perseverance of engineers. Parents also noted the development of an inquisitive mindset regarding materials and objects in their home and community environments. We argue that the significance of this study lies in the potential to develop children’s engineering identity in home environments beyond the pandemic, as well as inform children’s identity trajectory as engineers as they continue to accumulate traces of an engineering identity over time and space

Examining the Effects of Preschool Writing Instruction on Emergent Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature

This article presents the results of a systematic review of the literature involving writing interventions in the preschool setting. The information presented is timely considering the current expectations for young children to write. Framing the empirical literature within different philosophical approaches, trends were analyzed to identify instructional strategies related to increases in emergent literacy outcomes and where gaps in the literature existed. The results from 22 intervention conditions from 1990 to 2013 indicated the overall effect size was g = .44, 95% CIs [.27, .60], suggesting that preschool writing interventions enhanced children’s early literacy outcomes. The findings also highlighted the importance of quality literacy environments and adult involvement. The findings from this article have important instructional implications for writing instruction in the preschool setting

Appendices: Failures, errors and mistakes: A systematic review of the literature

Terms such as failure, mistakes, errors, obstacles, and struggle are used interchangeably, but each carry different connotations and discipline-specific meanings. Reactions to experiencing a failure can range as well, from being seen as having educative value to be debilitating. These reactions are based on criteria like environment, prior experiences and individual characteristics, to name a few. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize and clarify how these terms are articulated and utilized in research studies and commentaries published between 1970 and 2017. Through a systematic literature review, we will discuss similarities and differences in how researchers defined these terms, as well as how these definitions differ by cultural context, discipline, and age of participants. Next, we briefly highlight how our research findings on failure within making and tinkering contexts contribute to our current thinking on failure, mistakes, and errors. Our research included approximately 500 youths and 150 educators situated in a variety of settings that implement making and tinkering programs and/or activities including an informal educational setting (i.e., museum), a formal educational setting (i.e., public middle school), and a hybrid setting (i.e., science center running after-school programming at local school sites). We conclude with open questions and recommendations for the field to consider when conducting research around failures, errors, and mistakes in educational contexts

Modality Completion via Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoders for Multi-Modal Glioma Segmentation

In large studies involving multi protocol Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), it can occur to miss one or more sub-modalities for a given patient owing to poor quality (e.g. imaging artifacts), failed acquisitions, or hallway interrupted imaging examinations. In some cases, certain protocols are unavailable due to limited scan time or to retrospectively harmonise the imaging protocols of two independent studies. Missing image modalities pose a challenge to segmentation frameworks as complementary information contributed by the missing scans is then lost. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Multi-modal Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder (MGP-VAE), to impute one or more missing sub-modalities for a patient scan. MGP-VAE can leverage the Gaussian Process (GP) prior on the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to utilize the subjects/patients and sub-modalities correlations. Instead of designing one network for each possible subset of present sub-modalities or using frameworks to mix feature maps, missing data can be generated from a single model based on all the available samples. We show the applicability of MGP-VAE on brain tumor segmentation where either, two, or three of four sub-modalities may be missing. Our experiments against competitive segmentation baselines with missing sub-modality on BraTS'19 dataset indicate the effectiveness of the MGP-VAE model for segmentation tasks.Comment: Accepted in MICCAI 202