The College of Education created this video of me discussing my latest article. I hope you enjoy it as must as I enjoyed making it!
de Araujo, Z., Roberts, S. A., Willey, C., & Zahner, W. (2018). English learners in k-12 mathematics education: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 88, 879-919.
Separate education research grants in progress at the University of Missouri may help English language learners understand algebra and open careers in STEM fields to students with disabilities.
The projects also have implications related to legislation approved in Missouri to create an online science, technology, engineering and match curriculum.
The first research project is a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study “flipped instruction” of algebra. In flipped instruction, teachers send video lessons home with students to view, then class time is used for discussion and problem solving.
This is the second year of what is to be a three-year project. Zandra de Araujo, MU associate professor of math education, is one of the researchers.
“We are in the first significant year of data collection,” de Araujo said. “We’re in 30 classes this year.”
She said the project hopes to have 40 algebra teachers on board by year three.
De Araujo said flipped instruction holds promise in helping English language learners to understand alegebra. She said those students have more time to review the information the teacher sends home.
“It could potentially be impactful for them,” de Araujo said.
English language learners is a term used in an academics term describing students who do not speak or write fluently in English. Often they come from countries where English is not the native language.
The second project is a $1.25 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop better ways of teaching science, technology, engineering and math to middle school students. Delinda van Garderen, MU professor of special education, is one of the researchers involved in that project. She said the research is designed to help middle school teachers develop text in their instruction that is easier for all students to understand and work with.
Van Garderen said the project has completed work with its first group of five teachers and it has begun recruiting 10 new middle school teachers to work with researchers beginning in May.
“We really want to integrate good practice of literacy in students’ instruction,” she said. She said the goal is to help students be prepared for life after high school, including in STEM careers.
She said including all students in the research is an important aspect of it, which fits into her field of special education.
“It gives me an opportunity to work with teachers who have a diverse group of learners,” she said. “If a student struggles to read a text, I’m here to help the student. I’m thrilled to be a part of this.”
Van Garderen said the legislation requiring an online STEM curriculum is timely and fits in with the research.
“We want underrepresented students to have every opportunity available,” van Garderen said. “We want to give teachers strategies to help engage those students to pursue STEM careers.”
De Araujo, said she also can see a potential for using the online STEM curriculum in flipped algebra instruction.
“It’s interesting to see how it plays out,” she said of the future research results.
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Source: MU research projects may help English language learners, students with disabilities
This is the first of my #ShareMathEdResearch summaries. This is a work in progress. I welcome comments and questions on the format. Is it helpful? Are there other things that would be helpful to know? Are there some parts that aren’t necessary? Is this a helpful summary for practitioners and the public? Etc.
This article is from my dissertation study and focused on how high school math teachers taught English learners.
de Araujo, Z. (2017). Connections between secondary mathematics teachers’ beliefs and their selection of tasks for English language learners. Curriculum Inquiry, 47, 363–389.
Teachers often take a seemingly common sense approach to teaching mathematics with English learners, but that approach can result in students working on less interesting and meaningful math.
When I was a high school mathematics teacher in Orlando, Florida I taught a lot of English learners, but I did not teach them well. I didn’t know how to make math accessible without dumbing it down. There are reports that almost all U.S. teachers teach English learners, but we still don’t know much about how teachers choose problems and resources for English learners. I thought this study would provide some much needed insight in this area so I can help teachers who teach math with English learners.
Three teachers allowed me to learn from them. Each teacher taught a ninth-grade math class for English learners. The English learners were from different countries (including the US), but mostly spoke Spanish as their first language. The students also had different levels of English proficiency; some could speak, understand, write, and read in English while others were still learning.
I observed the teachers’ lessons for about two weeks. Before and after each lesson I interviewed them about their plans and how they thought it went. I also took field notes and did a couple of final interviews after the two weeks were up.
I found that the teachers did a lot of the things I did as a teacher. They took out words/language because they didn’t want to complicate the mathematics. However, math and language are connected. Math learning involves (and requires) talking, listening, reading, and writing about math. Also, more complex math problems tend to have more language, so taking away the language usually results in easier math (not always a good thing). The result is that many of the students participated in less meaningful and complex math.
I also found that we (I include myself in this) tend to talk about English learners as a single group of students. Each student is different in terms of the knowledge and resources they bring to the classroom. English learners vary greatly in their English proficiency. We need to know our students so we can draw on their prior knowledge and meet their individual needs.
Finally, I found (as have others before me) that our beliefs impact our practice greatly. We need to regularly check ourselves to make sure we are forming positive beliefs about our students. If we don’t believe our students can do something, they probably won’t because we won’t let them. If we believe they can do something, we will try our hardest to make it so.
We can’t remove language from math. Instead of thinking about how to make language easier, we need to think about how to help students learn math and language (even if we are math teachers). Whenever we focus on only math or only language, we are not truly supporting English learners.
I also learned that I need to try out some specific practices in schools with teachers and students so we can see what actually works. I know a lot about what doesn’t work, so now we need to know more about what does work.
When I was a guest on Sam Otten’s Math Ed Podcast I talked about this article. You can listen here.
Two books on teaching math with English learners that I really like.
I’ve been thinking about ways to share research papers more widely. Often, our work is behind paywalls and subject to copyright. This makes it inaccessible or difficult to access for many people. How do we change that? I’m going to try to make my work more accessible by sharing key findings and implications from my work on this site and also via social media. I’m going to tag these posts with #ShareMathEdResearch and hope others take up this work as well.
I understand it is not possible to communicate all the ins and outs of a paper in a short post, and that’s really not the point. The point is to share knowledge more broadly. People can still seek out full papers, this is just another way to communicate our work. Maybe these posts can be shared with policy makers, practitioners, those outside our field, and even our families. Here are some questions that I plan to answer in these posts:
In addition, I’ll try to adhere to the following:
I’m eager to hear others’ thoughts on these questions and criteria. Are there things missing? Would this be helpful? Are these the right questions and criteria? I’ll try this out in a subsequent post and I hope you do too.
When I was at NCTM’s Annual Conference last month, I was surprised and excited to learn that my newest publication is now available. I cowrote this chapter with a doctoral student (Erin Smith) and an elementary teacher (Melanie Kremmel). The chapter focuses on strategies Melanie (a new teacher at the time) used when teaching mathematics with Oksana, a newly arrived emergent bilingual student from the Ukraine.
In this chapter we connect Ms. Kremmel’s experiences with Oksana to a broader conversation about the ways in which teachers facilitate the instruction of English learners in elementary grades. In particular, we focus on the ways in which Ms. Kremmel was able to broaden her notion of communication to build on the resources Oksana did have in English rather than focusing on those she did not have. In doing so, Ms. Kremmel was able to help Oksana further her understanding of both mathematics and language. (p. 69)
Along with our chapter, the book features chapters from many of my favorite mathematics educators. I hope you can check it out!
de Araujo, Z., Smith, E., & Kremmel, M. (2018). Moving the mathematics forward while acquiring English. In S. Crespo, S. Celedón-Pattichis, & M. Civil (Eds.), Access and Equity: Promoting high-quality mathematics in grades 3-5 (pp. 67-80). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Edited by Sandra Crespo, Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis, and Marta Civil
Access and Equity: Promoting High-Quality Mathematics in Grades 3–5 examines the challenges related to access, equity, and empowerment faced by students making the critical transition into mathematics of the third through fifth grades. It provides guidance for making these essential improvements in practice:
The third through fifth grades are a crucial period when educational imbalances begin to take hold, as inequities in resources and expectations become more pronounced and significant. This book will help teachers provide a challenging, effective mathematics education for each and every student in those classrooms, and thus fully implement the Access and Equity Principle in NCTM’s Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All.
Zandra de Araujo, PhD