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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
2014
At conference
Annual Meeting of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
Pages
1-35
Place presented
New Orleans
Resource type
en
Resource status/form
en
Scholarship genre
en
IRE Approach/Concept
Assessment
Problem Framing
Language
en
Open access/full-text available
en 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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