The role of instructional representations on students' written representations and achievements
Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This research is based on Middle School Mathematics Project (MSMP) funded\nby the Interagency Educational Research Initiative through a grant to the American\nAssociation for the Advancement of Science. Both teacher’s instructional\nrepresentations and students’ written representations were coded and analyzed to\ninvestigate the nature and structure of the representations in teaching fractions, decimals\nand percents in middle school classrooms in three school districts in Texas. The study\nfurther explored the relationship between both the quality and quantity of instructional\nrepresentations and students’ written representations, and the relationship between\nstudents’ written representations and their achievements.\nThis dissertation used a mixed approach utilizing both quantitative and\nqualitative methods. The data was collected in the first two years of a five-year study. A\ntotal of 14 sixth grade mathematics teachers from three school districts in Texas were\nselected from the MSMP project. Before the actual videotaping procedure, a professional\ndevelopment focusing on multiple representations was held for the teachers. Both pretests and posttests were used to examine the relationship between the structure of\nstudents’ written representations and their achievements.\nThe results showed that the both the quantity and quality of teachers’\ninstructional representations varied a lot. Symbolic representations were the predominant\nrepresentations in classroom teaching. Structures of instructional representations\nconverge to content sub-constructs rather than format sub-constructs. Here subconstructs\ninclude part-whole, measure, quotient, multiplication by one and cross\nproduct. Instead, format sub-constructs include real world, manipulatives, pictures,\nspoken symbolic representations and written symbolic representations, however,\nconnections between these sub-constructs were not statistically significant. Within the\nthree content sub-constructs (part-whole, quotient, and multiplication by one) that\nrevealed by students’ written representations, quotient and multiplication by one\nsignificantly predicated the students’ posttest scores. It was also found that, among the\nthree quality criteria (accuracy, comprehensibility and connections) of instructional\nrepresentations, the comprehensibility score significantly predicated students’\nachievement in the posttests.
Author: Ye Sun
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2259091015