CAREER: Characterizing Critical Aspects of Mathematics Classroom Discourse

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The research in mathematics discourse has examined important issues in the characterization of effective teaching ranging from teacher goal setting to supporting student thinking. Much of this research has focused on describing the elements of discourse that investigators have posited as contributing to teaching and learning. This research study systematically expands on the characteristics of mathematical discourse and examines and specifies relationships between these descriptive elements across multiple content foci in mathematics and across a range of teachers at the middle grade levels. The principal investigator is conducting a microgenetic study based on examination of video data from multiple routine classroom settings with teachers who demonstrate varying levels of discourse across three curricular topics in mathematics. A review of the research literature on classroom discourse, with a focus in mathematics, supports the development of an analytic framework to characterize the discourse of both teachers and students in the classrooms. The discourse patterns from teachers at grades 5, 6 and 7 provide a comparison of the discourse across upper elementary and middle grade classrooms. The use of the analytic framework supports the development of metrics that can reliably measure critical aspects of mathematical discourse. These metrics examine both the function of the discourse in the classroom and the mathematical intellectual work that the discourse supports. The researcher builds on the analytic framework and resulting metrics to redesign courses offered to pre-service and practicing teachers in the university teacher education program. The resulting framework and redesigned teacher education courses will provide models on which other teacher education programs might build. The redesign of the pre-service and in-service courses effectively integrates the research into education.