Tackling Teaching: Understanding Commonalities among Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics Classroom Practices.

Abstract: Education research in chemistry, mathematics, and physics tends to focus on issues inherent to the discipline, most notably content. At this time, little literature evidence exists that documents fruitful collaborations between education specialists across the STEM disciplines. This work seeks to unite the disciplines by investigating a common task: teaching. This study explores how discipline-specific practices influence the common act of reformed teaching pedagogy with a focus on the use of inquiry. We seek to identify commonalities among classroom teaching practices in these disciplines and contribute to the development of analytical tools to study STEM teaching

How Students use Mathematical Resources in an Electrostatics Context

We present evidence that although students’ mathematical skills in introductory calculus-based physics classes may not be readily applied in physics contexts, these students have strong mathematical resources on which to build effective instruction. Our evidence is based on clinical interviews of problem solving in electrostatics, which are analyzed using the framework of Sherin’s symbolic forms. We find that students use notions of “dependence” and “parts-of-a-whole” to successfully guide their work, even in novel situations. We also present evidence that students’ naive conceptions of the limit may prevent them from viewing integrals as sums

Supporting Implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics: Recommendations for Professional Development

In 2010, the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers published the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and to date, 44 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the document. These content and practice standards, which specify what students are expected to understand and be able to do in K-12 mathematics, represent a significant departure from what mathematics is currently taught in most classrooms and how it is taught. Developing teachers’ capacity to enact these new standards in ways that support the intended student learning outcomes will require considerable changes in mathematics instruction in our nation’s classrooms. Such changes are likely to occur only through sustained and focused professional development opportunities for those who teach mathematics. The recommendations that follow are intended to support large-scale, system-level implementation of professional development (PD) initiatives aligned with the CCSSM. They emerged from the work done under the auspices of a NSF-funded project, which provided the opportunity for experts from diverse fields to collaboratively address the challenge of providing high-quality mathematics PD at scale to support the implementation of the CCSSM. Over the course of the project, researchers and expert practitioners worked to integrate various perspectives on this challenge into a set of design recommendations for creating, sustaining, and assessing PD systems for practicing mathematics teachers. Generated from the coordination of research-based knowledge in different but related fields, these recommendations build on state-of-the-art research findings from mathematics education, PD, organizational theory, and policy. The recommendations take into account the important role teachers will play in making the standards a reality. A substantive body of research points to teachers as the most important factor in promoting mathematics learning, and the education of teachers has been deemed an essential aspect in promoting educational improvement. Thus, the recommendations proposed here make salient that attending to the PD of practicing mathematics teachers in light of the CCSSM is a requirement for the successful implementation of the new standards. It is important to note that these recommendations are intended to build on, rather than replicate, the features of effective PD identified in prior research (e.g., Desimone, 2009; Elmore, 2002; Guskey & Yoon, 2009; Guskey, 2000). In particular, a recent report from the National Staff Development Council (Darling- Hammond et al., 2009) entitled, “Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the United States and Abroad” identified four basic, research-based principles for designing PD that we understand as common professional and research knowledge that serves as the foundation on which the current recommendations are built: 1) PD should be intensive, ongoing, and connected to practice; 2) PD should focus on student learning and address the teaching of specific content; 3) PD should align with school improvement priorities and goals; and 4) PD should build strong working relationships among teachers. We hope that the recommendations that follow, in conjunction with these four basic principles, can help districts and states in creating, sustaining, and assessing PD systems for practicing mathematics teachers that support their implementation of the CCSSM, and ultimately, the learning of all K-12 students

Utilization of Revoicing Based on Learners‘ Thinking in an Inquiry-Oriented Differential Equations Class

Researchers of mathematics education are increasingly interested in a teacher\u27s discursive moves, which refer to deliberate actions taken by a teacher to participate in or influence debate and discussion in the mathematics classroom. This study explored one teacher\u27s discursive moves in an undergraduate inquiry-oriented mathematics class. The data for this study come from four class sessions in which students investigated initial value problems as represented by the phase portrait of a system of differential equations. Through the analysis and a review of the literature, we identified four categories of a teacher\u27s discursive moves: revoicing, questioning/requesting, telling, and managing. This report focuses on the roles of revoicing as it relates to the development of mathematical ideas and student beliefs about themselves and mathematics. The results show that the teacher used revoicing in the following ways: revoicing as a binder, revoicing as a springboard, revoicing for ownership, revoicing as a means for socialization