Congratulations to Anand Bernard and Alicia Heninger who were the winners for their presentations at the Spring Research Conference held on March 19, 2016.
Anand’s presentation was on Middle School Teachers’ Curricular Decisions and Reasoning – For decades curriculum materials have been used as a means to reform the way that mathematics teaching and learning occurs. But recent research on the effects of curriculum materials indicates that teachers do not necessarily use curriculum materials as was intended by the curriculum designers. Recently researchers have begun to examine how teachers transform curriculum materials into instruction and the effects of these changes on student learning. While much has been done to learn about this process, most studies have been very broad in scope and currently there is little known about specific decisions teachers make when planning with curriculum materials.
For my thesis I seek to learn more about the specific decisions teacher make when using curriculum materials as well as their reasoning behind their decisions. Specifically I will compare novice and experienced teachers’ decisions when using the same curriculum materials on geometric transformations.
Alicia’s presentation was on The Effects of Imprecision on Mathematics Instruction – One purpose of math education is to produce good math teachers, and one aspect of good math teaching is good communication. Sometimes questions or statements made by teachers or students in a math lesson are not clear and that is a barrier to good communication. If students interpret the mathematics of questions or statements differently confusion can occur. Therefore, the more precise the question or statement the more likely the students and teachers are able to understand the mathematics behind the question or statement. For example, a student saying, “it is equal to 90 degrees” is imprecise because we do not know what “it” is referencing. Similarly the statement “we do the function” is imprecise because we do not know what action “do” is referencing. For this presentation I will present results from the Mathematically significant pedagogical Opportunities to build on Student Thinking (MOST) project to illustrate how imprecision can effect communication in mathematics classrooms.