Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education: Using Student-generated Strategies in Instructional Interactions to Build Multiplicative Structures in Urban Schools

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this three-year project is to model the development of children's multiplicative reasoning in urban classrooms in grades K-5. The project proposes to analyze teacher-student interactions during instruction to understand how students' productions (e.g., strategies, invented notations, arguments, claims, and explanations) are used for collective construction of complex mathematical knowledge that can lead to enhanced student outcomes. The project proposes, through observation at elementary classrooms in urban, low-income schools, to: (1) identify and classify teacher-student interactions that help generate student productions and the sequence that lead to significant mathematical understandings and practices; and (2) create models of thinking - a space of possible teaching and learning actions - that can help teachers adapt or reproduce effective teaching actions. The models created will be tested with other teachers in the last phase of the study. The research will use two types of cases: longitudinal cases of the development of individual student's thinking, and cross-sectional cases in which the focus is the sequence of teacher-student interactions. A secondary goal is to understand how children's reasoning about the strand of multiplicative structures - including fractions, rations, proportions, and multiplication and division - become integrated.