Education Commons^™

A Method For Assessing And Describing The Informal Inferential Reasoning Of Middle School Students, Joshua Michael Goss

Dissertations

Informal Inferential Reasoning (IIR) has emerged in the last decade in the study of statistics education. Developing students’ IIR ability is seen as a way of preparing students for the important topic of Formal Statistical Inference (FSI); however, research is still needed in order to investigate how students transition between informal and formal statistical reasoning. A primary difficulty is that we do not have a way of assessing and describing students’ IIR ability levels. In order to address this, an Assessment of Informal Inferential Reasoning (AIIR) was developed, along with a Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy (Biggs & …

Assessing U.S. High School Mathematics Students' Dependency On Calculators For Basic Arithmetic Operations Involving Integers From Single-Digit Fact Families, John Jeremy Sneed

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study was designed to investigate the extent to which high school students use calculators to perform basic operations, and how well they actually perform those same operations without using calculators. The investigation involved the testing of math classes of students--male and female, mixed ethnicities--in grades nine through twelve. Students were asked to perform all four basic math operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) involving integers based on single-digit addition and multiplication fact families with and without calculators. The testing was in two environments--timed and untimed, with students recording their completion times--in order to investigate discrepancies in students' calculator use in …

Rehearsal And Enactment For Teaching In Urban School Settings: A Qualitative Study Investigating The Connections Between A Math Methods Course And Fieldwork, Rajeev Virmani

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I studied teacher education reform efforts aimed at improving the preparation of preservice teachers through the use of rehearsals in a math methods class. As many experts in the field of teacher education call for curricula in which preservice teachers learn from and in practice, I investigated a type of pedagogy called rehearsals within a practice-based teacher education setting that may afford preservice teachers with the initial preparation needed to become effective teachers.

In this qualitative study, I examined how three preservice teachers and math methods instructors rehearse the high leverage practice of leading a whole-class discussion. …