Mathematics

One challenge facing the fields of mathematics education and special education is how to design instruction on fraction concepts that can meet the needs of diverse learners. An innovation that shows promise is to base instructional design upon well-established trajectories of students’ fraction learning. However, little research has been done to establish the effectiveness of this approach. We report the results of the second of two small studies of an intervention developed using a validated trajectory of students’ fraction concepts.

Women and ethnic minoritized individuals are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains in postsecondary education and in the workforce. The aim of the current study was to examine whether adolescents' perceptions of inclusivity, belonging, and discrimination in high school STEM classes are related to their STEM class engagement in and outside of school.

Professional development that privileges teachers’ voice, equity, and the investigation of high-quality instruction is essential to the mathematics education community. However, more research is needed to understand the process, content, and depth of teachers’ learning in this setting. This paper shares our analytic method designed to capture such learning. We integrate three complementary perspectives: Communities of Practice (theoretical framework), Teaching for Robust Understanding (conceptual framework), and Frame Analysis (analytical framework).

The resources that multilingual students bring to school mathematics are often ignored. During a teacher-researcher collaborative project focused on creating more equitable learning environments in high school math classrooms, we noted an initial tendency to focus on the challenges and barriers facing multilingual students. To counter this tendency, we worked with two teachers to engage in a structured teacher-student interview to identify and highlight secondary multilingual students’ home and community resources.

In this paper, we share the design and impact of a set of two-hour online mathematics professional development modules adapted from face-to-face video-based materials. The “Video in the Middle” (VIM) modules are aligned with principles of authentic e-learning and can be combined in a variety of ways to form professional development pathways that meet the unique needs of a wide range of professional learning settings and contexts. VIM modules aim to support teacher noticing of student thinking and increase their mathematical knowledge for teaching.

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of mathematical models in predicting the spread of the coronavirus (Srinivas 2020; Stevens & Muyskens 2020) and assessing the effectiveness of various safety measures in reducing that spread (Li et al 2020). These models can be extremely sophisticated, drawing on the expertise of applied mathematicians, epidemiologists, public health experts, and others, but at its core, there is a notion of exponential growth that is relevant for the secondary mathematics curriculum.