Collaborative Research: Parents, Teachers, and Multilingual Children Collaborating on Mathematics Together

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The connections between students' home and family contexts and the activities of formal schooling are critical to support meaningful learning and family engagement in formal schooling. The need to better understand and make use of those connections is particularly important for multilingual learners whose family and cultural contexts may differ significantly from school contexts and their teachers' own experiences. The goal of this project is to develop and study a mathematics partnership that engages multilingual children, their teachers, and their parents in mathematical experiences together. These mathematical experiences are designed to advance equity in mathematics education for multilingual students. The project will design professional learning opportunities for parents, teachers, and students, and study the ways in which the professional learning opportunities influence teacher beliefs, quality of instruction, parent beliefs, and teacher and parent understanding of positioning.This project uses a design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach, along with principles of Social Design Experiments to engage in iterative cycles of inquiry to develop, implement, and refine the model. Parents, teachers, and students in three states (Arizona, Maryland, and Missouri) will be recruited that represent diverse populations both with respect to demographics and with respect to the policy contexts surrounding multilingual learners. Two cohorts of parents will be invited to participate in the parent-teacher study group, one consisting of 6 parents and teachers per site and one consisting of 20 parents and their children’s teachers per site. In each iteration, data will be collected at multiple time points related to teachers’ beliefs about effective math instruction for multilingual students; quality of mathematics instruction for linguistically diverse students; focus group interviews with parents and students, and video records of teachers and parents working with their students doing mathematics during study group convenings. Data analysis will blend quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative methods will include t-tests, multivariate, and correlational analyses to examine changes in teacher beliefs, instructional quality, and the relationships between the two. Qualitative analyses using thematic coding and discourse analysis will be used to analyze study group meetings and outcomes related to parent and teacher positioning of multilingual learners.The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.