Understanding, Questioning, and Representing Mathematics: What Makes a Difference in Middle School Classrooms?

Abstract

Understanding the nexus of theorized Teaching Quality Measures (TQMs) and classroom enactments of learning goals is important. Video and student performance data for a two-year period were examined for two sixth grade mathematics teachers. Due to their importance in contributing to the development of mathematical conceptual understanding, the TQMs coded in the videos were probing for student understanding, encouraging curiosity and questioning, and using accurate representational forms. For each of the TQMs, graphical, time-integrated analyses were constructed and used to aid analysis and presentation of the results of coding. Although these middle school teachers generally remained consistent in their delivery of instruction, they modestly increased their enactments of the three TQMs. By the second year, both teachers demonstrated increases from their initial level of enactments, and when comparing each teacher’s performance to the prior year, their increased enactments were related to improved student performance based on the learning goal of converting fractions, decimals, and percents.