- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2151134
- First Name Ferdinand
- Last Name Rivera
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline Mathematics
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Ferdie Rivera
Need
This project seeks to develop middle school and secondary mathematics teachers that employ socially and culturally relevant math performance assessments to teach mathematics. We seek to produce math teachers who are comfortable developing and implementing such assessments in their own classrooms. By using socially relevant tasks as both a driver of investigation and motivation for learning mathematics, middle school and high school students will see mathematics as integral in their day-to-day realities.
Research Questions
In relation to this project, the exploratory study addresses the following research questions: (1) How do future middle school and secondary school math teachers develop justice-oriented math performance assessments that attend to both aspects of content and context integrity and rigor? (2) How do future middle school and secondary school math teachers’ experiences with developing justice-oriented math performance assessments influence their developing teaching practice? How do they prepare themselves to teach such assessments in the classroom?
Approach
For our theoretical framework, we draw on North’s (2006) perspective on social justice, which involves aspects of recognition and redistribution, sameness and difference, and macro- and microlevel processes. Justice issues could be about: representations of marginalized and minoritized groups; redistribution issues that have been inequitably distributed based on empirical data; social issues that prevent minoritized groups from exercising their right to freedom and happiness; issues of power that affect different social groups differently; and issues that model micro or macro processes of oppression that produce differential effects on groups. Our students investigated appropriate relevant justice issues that are supported by empirical data, which allowed them to determine relevant mathematical content for exploring the issues. Our methodology for developing, testing, and refining our students’ justice-oriented math performance assessments follows design research methods. The data we report in this poster presentation came from students’ responses from a survey about their experiences in designing, testing, and refining their justice-oriented performance assessments.
Outcomes
The findings we will share in the poster will address ways that our students have learned to develop justice-oriented math performance assessments that attend to both aspects of content and context integrity and rigor. We will also describe how justice-oriented math performance assessments influence their developing teaching practice and what they think they need to prepare themselves to teach such assessments in their own classrooms.
Broader Impacts
This two-year project teaches our students to intentionally employ mathematics as a tool for understanding justice issues, consistent with Gutstein and Peterson’s (2005) view about the importance of “teach(ing) math in a way that helps students more clearly understand their lives in relation to their surroundings, and to see math as a tool to help make the world more equal and just” (p. 1). Beyond that, we are training future middle school and high school mathematics teachers that possess skillful justice-oriented teaching practices.
