When students are engaged in their learning, they are more likely to dive deeper into the material. This is because they are actively participating in the process, asking questions, and seeking out answers.
This is a concept that was recently explored by Amanda Jansen, a University of Delaware professor in the College of Education and Human Development.
With attention to teachers’ first-person narratives and reflections, her study offers educators a model for understanding student engagement so that they can better facilitate deeper learning in their classrooms.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), it was found that the majority of the teachers in Jansen’s study understood the primary function of student engagement to be deeper learning about a mathematics concept rather than classroom performance. These teachers talked more about engagement in terms of cognitive, affective and social processes, and they often spoke about more than one dimension.
Jansen also emphasizes that how educators ask students to be engaged often reveals helpful information about educators’ instructional practices and their own assumptions. It can also send a message to students about their role in the learning process.
These more engaged students are more likely to analyze and evaluate information, rather than just passively accepting it. This higher level of thinking leads to a deeper understanding of the material and allows students to apply their knowledge in real-world situations.
To speak to Jansen about the study and its impact, click her "View Profile" button.
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Math can be a tough subject for students in K-12, particularly as the years go by. Educators at University of Delaware are working to see how to both identify this trend and potentially find solutions.
Amanda Jansen, professor in the School of Education at UD, recently published a paper detailing teacher noticing –– how teachers observe, recognize, and make sense of what's happening in their classrooms.
Jansen and others investigated what high school mathematics teachers and their students noticed about students’ mathematical engagement to develop a framework for teachers’ and students’ noticing of mathematical engagement.
"We conjecture that researchers can use this framework as an analytic tool to support the field's understanding of student engagement and teachers’ efforts to engage students," the paper notes.
Jansen is available for interviews on this topic. She has been quoted in publications like Education Week and recently celebrated as a 2023 Excellence in
Scholarly Community Engagement Award recipient. Click the "View Profile" page to contact her.
Media
Social
Biography
Dr. Amanda Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Teacher Education in the College of Education and Human Development's School of Education at the University of Delaware, and she has a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematical sciences at UD. She is a mathematics educator who conducts research on mathematics teaching practices that support students' motivation and engagement. She has obtained over $2 million in external funding from the National Science Foundation to support her research. She is committed to honoring students’ and teachers' voices in her research on students’ motivation and engagement. Her most recent book, Rough Draft Math: Revising to Learn, was published by Stenhouse Publishers. Her previous book, Motivation Matters and Interest Counts, was published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and was co-written with Dr. James Middleton at Arizona State University.
Before working in academia, Dr. Jansen was a junior high mathematics teacher in Arizona. At UD, she is invested in continually improving UD’s elementary mathematics teacher education courses through research and development work. She also conducts professional development to support in-service teachers' learning in Delaware and other states, including Washington and Virginia.
Dr. Jansen is a sought-after keynote speaker at national conferences such as the NCTM Innov8 conference and the Teachers Development Group Leadership Seminar, state level events around the country (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Kentucky, Montana), and international conferences (Norway). She is also regularly invited to speak on podcasts.
Industry Expertise
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise
Mathematics Education
Teacher Education
Student Motivation
Student Engagement
Rough Draft Math
Media Appearances
What It Looks Like When Students Share and Revise Rough Drafts in Math Class - MindShift
KQED online
2020-09-28
This is the second article in a two-part series about rough draft math. In the first post, University of Delaware professor Amanda Jansen discusses how framing math as a shared exploration enables more students to develop math competence and confidence. This post uses classroom examples to show some of the ways teachers can foster rough draft talk and set up students to revise their solutions.
How Encouraging Rough Draft Thinking in Math Class Highlights the Strengths of All Students
KQED online
2020-09-28
This is the first article in a two-part series about rough draft math, a concept that applies a process from language arts — creating, discussing and revising rough drafts — to math classrooms. In this Q&A, Amanda Jansen, a University of Delaware math education researcher, discusses how framing math as a shared exploration, rather than a set of right or wrong steps, enables more students to develop math competence and confidence. Jansen is the author of Rough Draft Math: Revising to Learn, published this year by Stenhouse. In part two, learn some strategies for how to foster rough draft talk and how to structure revisions in math classrooms.
Getting Students to Talk About Math Helps Solve Problems
Education Week online
2020-05-05
Amanda Jansen, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Delaware, argues that sharing rough drafts in math can serve two powerful purposes at once: It can deepen students’ understanding of math ideas and practices, and it can create an equitable learning environment.
“Most of us have experienced mathematics classrooms where the ‘smart’ students were those who arrived at the correct answers quickly,” Jansen wrote in her new book, Rough Draft Math: Revising to Learn. “Everyone wants to feel smart, and no one wants to feel embarrassed for being wrong.”
To keep math and STEM careers a possibility for all students, Middleton and Amanda Jansen, a professor of mathematics education in the School of Education at the University of Delaware, are studying what contributes to positive student engagement and therefore effective learning.
Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Efforts to Foster Classroom Democracies. A Response to" Creating a Democratic Mathematics Classroom"
Democracy and Education
2021
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.
Elements of instruction that motivate students with learning disabilities to learn fractions
Mathematical Thinking and Learning
2022
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.
Tracing mathematics engagement in the first year of high school: relationships between prior experience, observed support, and task-level emotion and motivation
ZDM–Mathematics Education
2023
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.
Secondary mathematics teachers’ descriptions of student engagement
Educational Studies in Mathematics
2023
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]).
Entangling and Disentangling Inquiry and Equity: Voices of Mathematics Education and Mathematics Professors
Journal of Urban Mathematics Education
2023
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).
2023 Kentucky Center for Mathematics Conference Lexington, Kentucky
Keynote Speaker
2023 Annual STEM Summer Institute Bozeman, Montana
Spotlight Speaker
2023 annual meeting of the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Washington, D.C.
Teachers’ motivations for and enactments of rough draft math
(2022) Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Middle Tennessee State University
Opportunities for mathematics engagement in secondary teachers’ practice: Validating an observation tool
(2021) Proceedings of the forty-third annual Jansen, C.V. 8 meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Philadelphia, PA
Using teacher and student noticing to understand engagement during secondary mathematics lessons
(2021) Proceedings of the forty-third annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Philadelphia, PA
Entangling and disentangling inquiry and equity: Voices of mathematics education and mathematics professors.
(2021) Proceedings of the fortythird annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Philadelphia, PA
High school mathematics teachers’ orientations toward engagement
(2020) Mathematics Education Across Cultures: Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Mexico
