Education Commons^™

Differentiated Homework: Impact On Student Engagement, Gearoid Keane, Manuela Heinz

Journal of Practitioner Research

This paper describes a mixed methods practitioner research study that aimed to enhance student engagement with homework. Based on a comprehensive literature review and data from a pre-study questionnaire, a differentiated homework strategy was designed by the teacher researcher. Students were assigned homework once a week to allow them to balance homework requirements more successfully with out-of-school activities. They were given a choice of three tasks each week, ranging from lower to higher difficulty levels. Task difficulty levels were not stated, nor were tasks ordered by difficulty. Students’ attitudes towards homework improved over the course of the study and completion …

Crossing The Final Frontier: Exploring The Numeracy Demands Of Texts Read In English Language Arts, Ellen C. Agnello, Kevin M. Agnello

Numeracy

Incited by the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2009 Reading Framework and the Common Core State Standards, recent shifts in national education goals have urged English language arts teachers to make curriculum adjustments. One such adjustment is to shift their focus from fiction, which has traditionally dominated the curriculum, to nonfiction. Doing so has the potential to increase students’ exposure to informational texts which often employ numeric modes to represent quantitative data, thus necessitating numeracy knowledge. This article presents a study of 60 nonfiction texts taught in secondary ELA classrooms. Through analysis of these texts, it addresses the questions: Which …

Developing Mathematics Teachers’ Attention To Quantitative Reasoning In Task Design: A Modeling Approach, David Glassmeyer

Numeracy

This study examines how a models-and-modeling perspective affected teachers' attention to quantitative reasoning in task design. A Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA) was implemented with 21 teachers over four weeks, challenging teachers to design a quantitative reasoning task for their students. Teachers’ initial quantitative reasoning tasks did not incorporate quantities or quantitative relationships, two essential components of quantitative reasoning. As teachers revised their tasks through the MEA, most teachers began attending to these components. This article details how a modeling approach to teacher education provided a method to describe and support teachers to incorporate quantitative reasoning in their classroom tasks, though attending …

On "Icky" Data, The Political Classroom, And Towards Equity And Social Justice In Mathematics Education: A Conversation With Tonya Bartell, Samuel L. Tunstall, Oyemolade Osibodu, Tonya Gau Bartell

Numeracy

Tonya G. Bartell, ed. 2018. Towards Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing) 341 pp. ISBN 978-3319929064.

This brief interview with Tonya Bartell introduces Towards Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education to the Numeracy audience. The interviewers also discuss with Tonya connections between quantitative literacy and mathematics for social justice, particularly in the context of US K-12 schooling. Tonya shares her perspective on topics ranging from the placement of quantitative literacy in K-12 mathematics education and how one might get started in incorporating a social justice lens into their teaching to paradigms for research …