REU Site: PATHWAYS - Preparing Aspiring Teachers to Hypothesize Ways to Assist Young Students

Salisbury University, Salisbury MD

Investigators

Abstract

The country is in need of more skilled mathematics teachers and mathematics education researchers. This project, PATHWAYS, will address this need and provide undergraduate students from teacher preparation programs with a structured experience in which they teach small groups of children and explore the impact of their instruction on the children's mathematical learning. The undergraduate students will benefit from intensive, systematic reflection on their instructional practices, and the children involved will benefit from the opportunity to participate in lessons that transcend the boundaries of conventional mathematics instruction in the United States. Salisbury University will host eight undergraduate students for 10 weeks during the summer to do mathematics education research regarding how students effectively learn mathematics in the K-12 setting. The overarching goals of PATHWAYS are to help undergraduate students develop formative assessment techniques vital to becoming accomplished teachers and to motivate graduate study in mathematics education. Undergraduate students will work in pairs, mentored by faculty, and each pair will pose mathematics tasks to groups of four children during weekly instructional sessions. The sessions will be video recorded and children's written work will be retained. Each undergraduate pair will collaboratively analyze data from each session. Each week's data analysis will determine the mathematical learning goals and instructional methods for the next week. Undergraduate students will submit weekly reports describing children's learning and cumulative case study reports describing the path of the children's learning under the instructional sequences they designed. PATHWAYS will provide a model of how undergraduate research can help develop the human resources needed to support the conduct of mathematics education research. This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) project is funded by NSF's Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship (Noyce) and EHR Core Research (ECR) programs in recognition of its alignment with the teacher preparation goals of the Noyce program and the fundamental research goals of the ECR program.