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Accounting for How Practitioners Frame a Common Problem of Practice: Students’ Struggle in Mathematics

Item

Title

Accounting for How Practitioners Frame a Common Problem of Practice: Students’ Struggle in Mathematics

Abstract/Description

A central goal of ambitious teaching is to support all students to participate in rigorous mathematical activity. However, in any instructional regime, at least some students are bound to struggle at particular times (e.g., with specific content, with participating in mathematical practices). Prior research suggests that how teachers frame the problem of student struggle in mathematics impacts instructional decisions. In this paper, we argue that being able to support all students to participate in rigorous mathematical activity entails developing productive framing regarding students’ struggle in mathematics. We describe the development of an interview-based assessment of how practitioners frame students’ struggle, and we argue that assessing this is important when both trying to design for and account for instructional improvement aimed at rigorous learning goals for students. One dimension of framing is diagnostic, or the nature of how a practitioner explains, or frames, student success or failure in mathematics. A second dimension is prognostic, or how a practitioner describes the nature of supports s/he provides to struggling students. In addition, we provide descriptive statistics of the use of this assessment in a large-scale study investigating instructional reform in middle-grades mathematics. A team of coders used a coding scheme to code 936 interviews with teachers, coaches, and school leaders across five years. Initial findings suggest that participants’ framing generally remained static over the course of the study. School leaders’ and coaches’ frames were generally more productive than those of the teachers. This snapshot illustrates that a significant challenge in mathematics education reform efforts entails supporting the reorganization of how practitioners frame the problem of students’ struggle in mathematics.

Date

At conference

Annual Meeting of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

Pages

1-35

Place presented

Resource type

Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

Manuscript

Scholarship genre

Empirical

IRE Approach/Concept

Open access/full-text available

Yes

Grant number

NSF (Grants #ESI-0554535, DRL-0830029, and DRL-1119122)

Citation

Jackson, K., & Gibbons, L. (2014). Accounting for How Practitioners Frame a Common Problem of Practice: Students’ Struggle in Mathematics. Annual Meeting of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

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