As with any inquiry project, the first stage in our process was research. We researched possible classroom interventions that would help us create a student-centered environment that would aid in creating a culture of perseverance. Starting with some articles from one of our project leads, we read in detail about supporting deep conceptual learning. From there we began researching more specifically how to set up and maintain classroom norms that support independent learning and specific activities that promote deep thought in algebra.
We spent several months reading and reflecting on research articles and came away with a few intervention tools and measurement instruments to apply to our classes starting in Winter of 2016. We also found some tasks that we thought were written with a low floor high ceiling to use as our rubric tasks; our website includes examples of these tasks as well as the rubric we used to score them.
Some of the most notable work we called on was from Angela Duckworth, Jo Boaler, Carol Dweck. Additional articles that informed our research included:
- “The Effects of Classroom Mathematics Teaching on Students Learning” – Hiebert and Grouws
- “Levels of Cognitive Demand”–Derived from the work of Doyle on academic tasks (1988) and Resnick on high-level-thinking skills (1987), the Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM 1991), and the examination and categorization of hundreds of tasks used in the QUASAR classrooms (Stein, Grover, and Henningsen1996; Stein, Lane and Silver 1996).
- “Teaching for Understanding Teaching”– Dvora Peretz. For the Learning of Mathematics, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Nov., 2006), pp. 24-29, 38
- “Deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning”– Jackie Lubin
- “Supporting Deep Conceptual Learning”– Peter Rillera and Helen Padgett
