Research report by Leslie Dietiker, Rashmi Singh, Meghan Riling, and Hector I. Nieves. How can we design mathematical lessons that spark student interest? To answer this, we analyzed teacher-designed and enacted lessons that students described as interesting for how the content unfolded. When compared to those the same students described as uninteresting, multiple distinguishing characteristics […]
Research brief report by Jaepil Han, Meghan Riling, Hector I. Nieves, Leslie Dietiker, and Rashmi Singh. The importance of curricular coherence has been emphasized by leaders in mathematics education, who explain that coherence enhances deeper understanding by enabling students to see connections between mathematical ideas. Although there are different forms of curricular coherence in teaching […]
Poster by Hector I. Nieves, Rashmi Singh, and Leslie Dietiker What impact, if any, do interesting lessons have on the types of questions students ask? We analyzed 145 student questions from 12 lessons, developing a rubric of student questions: factual, procedural, reasoning, and exploratory. Initial results suggest high-interest lessons contain more exploratory questions, and had […]
The MCLE team will be presenting at AMTE 2021! Presentation title: Fostering Positive Student Participation by Supporting Teachers’ Discursive Tactics Time: Friday, Feb 19, 3:00-3:45pm To combat negative perceptions of mathematics among secondary students, we describe multiple discursive strategies (“tactics”) used by six experienced high school mathematics teachers to elicit student interest, engagement, and […]
The MCLE team presented a poster for the NSF CADRE Conference that describes the results of 4 years of research. In it, an overview of the MCLE design approach, using the mathematical story framework, is given. In addition, the comparison data for 8 classrooms (for 6 high school teachers across 3 different schools) is provided, […]
Undergraduate research team member Sarina Simons recently shared her analysis of student engagement during MCLEs. Student Engagement in MCLEs Engagement in a classroom is always a topic of conversation in a math classroom. Over the course of the semester, I observed two lessons in six public high school math classrooms, with the goal of isolating […]
Our project team is publishing two sets of findings as part of the proceedings of the Psychology of Mathematics Education – North American Chapter (PME-NA) organization. Although the conference has been rescheduled to occur in Spring 2021, the research report What makes a mathematics lesson interesting to students? (authors Leslie Dietiker, Rashmi Singh, Meghan Riling, […]
During this workshop, participants will get the chance to explore the various aesthetics that can be experienced while doing mathematics, get to know one of the MCLE lessons and discuss how it can be thought of as a story, and examine teachers’ design processes in order to think about how they enabled teachers to design […]
The Impact of Mathematically Captivating Learning Experiences Research suggests that secondary students often do not have positive experiences with mathematics. To address this challenge, this research report shares findings of a design-based research project in which researchers and teachers use a mathematical story framework to design and test mathematically captivating lesson experiences (“MCLEs”) for high […]
Captivating students WITH mathematics: Boston area teachers share their lesson designs Friday, Sept 27 – 8:00-9:15am Hynes Convention Center, room 207 High school teachers from the Boston region will introduce how they plan and enact “mathematical stories”–lessons designed to spur student curiosity, captivate students with complex mathematical content, and compel students to engage and persevere. […]