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Columns::March 24, 2003
Second in charge: Interim senior vice president named permanent provost
Men’s basketball coach, two players suspended; team forgoes postseason
Cabinet adopts policy requiring first-year students to live on campus
Famed scientist will discuss biodiversity preservation at spring Charter Lecture
Symposium marks microbiology’s 50th year
‘Advocates in action’
Professor teaches students how to make beautiful music together
Retirees
Newsmakers
Forum essay: What make the world so round
After school specials
Campus News
$1.1 million NSF grant funds three-year study of interaction of algebra learning, teaching
By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
With national education reform proposals calling for students to begin studying algebra in earlier grades, UGA College of Education researchers are undertaking a three-year project in one northeast Georgia middle school to study how mathematics
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Andrew Izsák
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teaching and learning interact--and more importantly, how that process might be made more effective.
Faculty members in mathematics education and the Learning Performance Support Laboratory have received a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct the project called “Coordinating Students’ and Teachers’ Algebraic Reasoning” (CoSTAR) beginning this spring in Morgan County Middle School.
“When people hear the word algebra, they usually think of high school courses that focus on skills like solving equations,” says Andrew Izsák, an assistant professor in mathematics education and lead investigator for the project. “The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and other organizations concerned with mathematics education have recently articulated a vision of algebra focused on reasoning and problem solving that is appropriate for students in earlier grades and that can better prepare students for symbolic aspects of high school algebra courses.”
The CoSTAR project will videotape classroom mathematics lessons to investigate how both the teacher and the students understood those lessons. The project will focus on three teachers and three cohorts of six students--one each in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades--of the middle school’s10 mathematics teachers and
685 students from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Research in education and psychology has shown that adults and children often understand shared experiences in different ways, but much less is known about how teachers and their students understand shared lessons or how classroom learning occurs over sequences of lessons.
“In fact, research on teachers and teaching and on students and learning has rarely been conducted in the same classrooms,” says Izsák. “The CoSTAR project will focus on the interplay between teachers’ and students’ understandings of shared classroom interactions and on the ways they work together to shape the teaching and learning of middle-school algebra.”
Researchers will examine the sense that students make of their opportunities to learn and teachers’ sensitivity to the core learning issues for their students. The scope of the project requires a team of researchers who will collaborate on data collection and analysis.
Other UGA investigators in the project include Bradford Findell and John Olive, also faculty members in mathematics education, and Chandra Orrill, a research scientist in the Learning Performance Support Laboratory. Graduate students in mathematics education and in instructional technology will be support staff for the project.
The connections between classroom teaching and learning discerned through the CoSTAR project could apply to other subject areas as well. |
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