CRESMET Supporting National Drive for Math and Science
In the center’s three largest NSF-funded projects (see below), CRESMET researchers are beginning to find evidence that models they are testing for changing the American way of teaching math and science can help the nation’s students acquire the skills they need to compete in the global economy.
CRESMET-led projects are also investigating how students develop reasoning abilities and an understanding of the foundational concepts of mathematics and science.
“We feel an urgent responsibility to help the nation’s schools and teachers meet the challenges they face, because the problems in math and science are so severe and are rapidly undercutting America’s ability to innovate and compete,” said CRESMET Director Marilyn Carlson.
At the national level, groups of business and government leaders have issued increasingly alarmed reports about the impact of lagging U.S. math and science education on the nation’s ability to retain its competitive edge in research and industrial innovation (see inset).
In Arizona, Gov. Janet Napolitano has chosen a theme of science and math-based innovation for her 2006–07 term as chair of the National Governors’ Association, which is intensifying the spotlight on Arizona initiatives led by CRESMET, the public-private campaign AZIMASE—Arizona Initiative in Mathematics and Science Education: http://azimase.asu.edu and the Governor’s P-20 Council: http://www.azgovernor.gov/P20/.
Links: Recent National Reports on U.S. Math and Science Challenge“Science and Engineering Indicators 2006” and “America’s
Pressing Challenge: Building a Stronger Foundation,” National Science
Board. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/ |
UPDATE: CRESMET’s NSF-Funded Research Projects
Project Pathways
Project Pathways is a five-year, $12.5 million project focused on professional development for combined groups of secondary math and science teachers.
Pathways faculty and graduate students are developing and studying a professional development model in which high school math and science teachers take a four-course graduate sequence tied to professional learning communities.
The courses engage teachers in projects that develop deep meanings of foundational concepts and powerful mathematical and scientific reasoning abilities. As the secondary math and science teachers in a district move through the four-course graduate sequence, they concurrently meet in weekly professional learning community (PLC) sessions with four to six colleagues from their school.
The PLC sessions support teachers in becoming better teachers by helping them to:
- Develop meaningful lessons and then test-implement them in a class of students
- Study videos of the lessons being taught
- Work together to refine the lessons based on their impact on student thinking and learning.
This mode of professional development is common in Japan and is referred to as the Japanese lesson study model.
CRESMET is implementing and testing the Pathways model in high schools in Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, Tolleson and Scottsdale school districts.
In the heart of the research effort, Pathways is supporting math, science and engineering faculty to study the effectiveness of the courses and PLCs on teachers and their classroom practices.
Marilyn Carlson, Michael Oehrtman, Anton Lawson, Robert Culbertson, Stephen Krause and Veronica Burrows are mentoring over 20 graduate students in various investigations to produce formative knowledge for refining the model and for assessing the project’s impact on the partner districts, participating teachers and students.
After three iterations of implementing the model, Pathways courses are emerging as highly effective for improving teachers’ understandings of foundational concepts of mathematics and science, and in improving their ability to engage in meaningful reflections on their practices.
Although these results are encouraging, we are learning that many math and science teachers learned their own mathematics and science through heavily procedural instruction. That is, in science, they learned to memorize facts without much understanding of scientific concepts and ways of reasoning; in mathematics, they learned to memorize equations and work them mechanically, without understanding the ideas behind the equations or how the mathematics model real-world phenomena.
Research has indicated that such procedural instruction leaves students with scant ability to think through mathematical and scientific questions in real world applications.
Naturally enough, when people who have learned only procedural math and science come to be teachers themselves, they teach as they were taught. With their deeply held view that teaching is about memorizing facts and procedures, and shallow conceptions of fundamental mathematical ideas such as rate-of-change and function, many teachers can offer only low-quality instruction.
Thus the process of realizing dramatic shifts in teachers’ practices requires sustained interventions, ones focused on helping teachers to acquire the deep conceptions that are necessary for their creating quality learning environments. Although our progress is encouraging, many obstacles are yet to be overcome to realize the profound shifts in teachers’ classroom practices that Arizona and U.S. students deserve.
To gain a better understanding of the culture of U.S. education and classrooms as it compares to those of Japan and Germany, read “The Teaching Gap” by James Stigler and James Hiebert. (Read a review from the website of the Mathematical Association of America, http://www.maa.org/reviews/teachgap.html ). The book conveys the difficult challenges that confront us as we work to improve U.S. teaching and classroom culture so that more American students are equipped and motivated to pursue science, engineering and mathematics careers.
ROLE Project Working in Middle Grades
CRESMET’s NSF ROLE (Research on Learning and Education) grant project, A Longitudinal Study of the Development of Rational Number Knowledge in the Middle Grades, is designed to trace longitudinal changes in rational number knowledge. For the past 24 months, a team of 12 ASU graduate students has conducted videotaped interviews with over 80 students once every three weeks and has observed their mathematics classes twice weekly.
Although the project will continue to collect data for another
year, the wealth of information already collected is beginning to
yield valuable insights. There seem to be, for example, a handful of
strategies and tactics that students prefer to use when thinking
about situations involving rational numbers. 
In an unexpected bonus, students who have participated regularly in interviews have seen significant improvement in their test scores (see graph). This surprised the researchers, because instruction was not part of their research methodology. Nonetheless, simply by participating in interviews about their mathematical thinking, students have made significant gains in rational number understanding when compared with their classmates.
Principal Investigator James Middleton, director of ASU College of Education’s Division of Curriculum and Instruction, sees teacher professional development programs and materials as a probable follow-up project in order to disseminate and apply the findings of this research agenda.
In the meantime, he is pleased that the students who have taken the time to talk about rational numbers with researchers over the past two years are taking with them some enhanced mathematical skills and reasoning abilities to assist them in future mathematics courses.