Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Noticing and Wondering: An Equity-Inducing yet Accessible Teaching Practice

Noticing and Wondering is a promising practice with an emerging research base in mathematics education for helping move teachers to a more contemporary paradigm of learning where culturally and linguistically diverse students have more equitable opportunities for academic success. This paper documents and extends this emerging research of Noticing and Wondering to fill a gap in the literature by (1) conceptualizing six reasons for the value of Noticing and Wondering and (2) discussing its potential to support English learners, such as by providing teachers easy access to students’ cultural assets. We document application of Noticing and Wondering beyond mathematics and conclude with a call for empirical research and practice in this direction

The Myth of the Reliability Test

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and subsequent revisions to Federal Rule of Evidence 702, was supposed to usher a reliability revolution. This modern test for admissibility of expert evidence is sometimes described as a reliability test. Critics, however, have pointed out that judges continue to routinely admit unreliable evidence, particularly in criminal cases, including flawed forensic techniques that have contributed to convictions of innocent people later exonerated by DNA testing. This Article examines whether Rule 702 is in fact functioning as a reliability test, focusing on forensic evidence used in criminal cases and detailing the use of that test in states that have adopted the language of the 2000 revisions to Rule 702. Surveying hundreds of state court cases, we find that courts have largely neglected the critical language concerning reliability in the Rule. Rule 702 states that an expert may testify if that testimony is “the product of reliable principles and methods,” which are “reliably applied” to the facts of a case. Or as the Advisory Committee puts it simply, judges are charged to “exclude unreliable expert testimony.” Judges have not done so in state or federal courts, and in this study, we detail how that has occurred, focusing on criminal cases