Algebra Teaching Study: A UC-Berkeley, Michigan State collaboration to study the practice and practitioners of school algebra teaching
Background & Purpose:
We propose to explore the following two questions: (1) What instructional practices are frequently used by teachers judged to be doing an exceptional job of helping students to develop proficiency in solving word problems? and (2) What analytic procedures can be developed and used to characterize these promising teaching practices, with low enough cost so that connections between teaching and learning can be examined for a large number of classrooms?
Setting and Research Design:
This is a comparative study designed to generate descriptive [case study, observational] and associative or correlational [analytic essay, interpretive commentary] evidence. This project collects original data through school records or policy documents; assessments of learning, achievement tests, observation [personal observation, videography] survey research [self-completion questionnaire, semi-structured or informal interviews].
We will be coding videotaped examples of teaching, looking for instances of productive pedagogical practices, and then seeking to relate the classroom practices to student performance.
In the 2010-11 project year, we will be using our observation scheme to observe algebra instruction in about 10 eighth-grade classrooms. Each classroom will be observed several times over the school year. Students in each class will complete a pre-assessment and post-assessment, designed to measure their robust understanding of mathematics for solving algebra word problems. Data from this year will be used to make improvements in the observation scheme (ACTION) and in the tools for student assessment.
This project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Award IDs 0909851 and 0909815).