To get a more complete picture of something, you step up to a higher position. However, in doing so, you often miss the subtle nuances that come from being at the ground level. This is why viewing education from various levels is important and why this concept has been a crucial factor within the School of Education’s mathematics program over the past 25 years. On the following pages, a few of our faculty members detail some of this history and our current work. Professor Margaret Smith p...
For the past 25 years, Mary Kay Stein, professor and chair of the Learning Sciences and Policy program, and I—along with our graduate students and other colleagues—have been engaged in conducting research on mathematics teaching and learning and using these findings to create materials and professional education experiences for teachers. This focus on putting research into practice, which is at the heart of the mission of the School of Education, has served to provide both a solid evidenc...
A persistent challenge in school districts across the United States is ensuring that education is equitable in areas such as district policies, cultural awareness, math instruction, and assessments. As a way of defining and framing the problem, educators and policymakers often reference the achievement gap between racial and/or economic subgroups as evidence of inequities as well as differences in rates of graduation, enrollment in upper- level courses, and entrance to and choice of major in...
The success of research on mathematics instructional tasks conducted by Margaret “Peg” Smith, myself, and others over the last 25 years at the School of Education led us to wonder about the feasibility of researching these same topics at a much larger scale. What could we learn about how well challenging instruction predicts student achievement across hundreds of schools? What could we determine about the school, district, and even statewide conditions that are necessary to support teachers a...