Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Efforts to Foster Classroom Democracies. A Response to" Creating a Democratic Mathematics Classroom"
Democracy and Education2021
How can middle school mathematics teachers navigate their roles as authorities in managing classroom democracies while providing their students with opportunities to exercise their rights? The concept of complementarity (Vithal, 1999) acknowledges that a teacher’s authority is not always in conflict with students’ rights or agency, but instead a teacher’s authority can be exercised judiciously to invite students to enact their rights. In this response to “Creating Democratic Mathematics Classrooms,” we take up the authors’ invitation to reflect on how we consider the role of responsibilities in classrooms that promote Torres’s Rights of the Learner.
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Elements of instruction that motivate students with learning disabilities to learn fractions
Mathematical Thinking and Learning2022
Despite the documented influence of motivation on mathematics learning for most students, we understand far less about this relation for students identified with learning disabilities. Based on Rogoff’s three planes of analysis (i.e., personal, community, and interpersonal), we gathered survey, interview, and video data to understand the motivations of sixth graders in a special education mathematics classroom as well as classroom conditions that supported motivation during a unit on fractions. By the end of that unit, students reported improved ability beliefs and attributed the changes to increased conceptual understanding of fractions, exposure to strategies for sense making, and the additional time and assistance provided to them.
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Tracing mathematics engagement in the first year of high school: relationships between prior experience, observed support, and task-level emotion and motivation
ZDM–Mathematics Education2023
We examined the relationships between different aspects of mathematics engagement for 285 students in their first year of high school in the United States. Path Analyses were used to trace the relationships between students’ self-reported prior motivation and appraisals of control and value of mathematics, perceptions of teacher support and peer support. These variables and observed teacher and peer support as coded from video by researchers, were examined as potentially impacting students’ self-reported in-the moment affect and task-level control and value appraisals Our results showed three key contributions. First, significant paths corresponded to relationships predicted by Control Value Theory (CVT) across a particularly robust set of variables and over the course of their first semester in high school.
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Secondary mathematics teachers’ descriptions of student engagement
Educational Studies in Mathematics2023
There is a need for a more robust conceptualization of engagement in mathematics education research. Investigating how teachers describe engagement can provide insight into relationships between purposes of engagement and dimensions of engagement. In this exploratory study, we examined how 28 secondary mathematics teachers in two states in the USA talked about their students’ engagement. During interviews, we asked teachers to provide their definitions for engagement, describe their teaching strategies for engaging students, and describe their observations of engagement during a video clip from their own classroom. We interpreted teachers’ talk to identify how they described the nature of mathematics engagement (dimensions such as behavioral, cognitive, affective, and/or social engagement) and purposes of engagement (engagement in learning or in schooling [Harris, 2011]).
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Entangling and Disentangling Inquiry and Equity: Voices of Mathematics Education and Mathematics Professors
Journal of Urban Mathematics Education2023
Professors of mathematics and mathematics education engage in inquiry, and, as teachers of mathematics, they engage their students in inquiry. How could this work be more equity-minded? After participating in inquiry during a summer institute, 24 mathematics education professors and mathematics professors shared their voices during two interviews about how equity and inquiry intertwine. These participants engaged in a co-writing process to equitably inquire together for this paper. Findings are presented in a framework of relationships between inquiry and equity, which extend the previous work of Tang and colleagues (2017), illustrating that (a) equity opportunities and dilemmas are always present during inquiry,(b) we can see equity (or in-equity) in inquiry (occurring during the process of engaging in inquiry), and (b) some participants conducted inquiry for equity (the propose of inquiry was to work toward greater equity).
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