Topics in Mathematics Education
This summer will be all about assessment – designing assessment systems that will attempt to
study the relative success of extremely unique classroom systems. (read it again – the bonus is
that you also get to learn about some “extremely unique classroom systems!”). I am currently
partnered with several schools/classes, from grade five through grade twelve, and need to shift
my focus this summer from the classroom systems that we have in place in those school sites to
some methods for assessing whether and in what ways these systems are effective. This research
will involve working directly with teachers, analyzing interviews and classroom activities with
students, and possibly designing some supplements to be used in later iterations of these
classroom systems, so that we can collect more meaningful data as we go.
For example – in grade five, we have implemented a cohesive classroom system that ties both
curriculum and non-content classroom goals to a role-playing system in which students level up
their characters, go on quests, and participate in team challenges. Sounds awesome, right?
(answer: yes). However, figuring out how to study these types of systems is inherently difficult,
and never straightforward. We have a lot of data, and now we need a great team of math, stats,
liberal studies, and/or any other STEM-disciplined students who are interested in and dedicated
to working hard to figure out how to assess alternative classroom environments in the middle and
high school grades.
Assessment is a huge, very broad category of research, and one that future teachers especially
would benefit from delving into. Not only will it help to provide some perspective to potential
future teachers, in terms of exploring the different types and levels of assessment that go into
declaring a classroom intervention “A success!,” but it may also help inspire some more ideas for
unique classroom systems that could be adapted from what we’ve already designed. However,
our team should not be limited to only future teachers – anyone interested in thinking through
ways to make mathematics (and education more broadly) fun for students of all ages, and to help
improve young people’s classroom experiences, are invited to contact me at
dchampne@calpoly.edu. A more diverse team will surely help this research be even more
meaningful and thoughtful.
The ultimate goal of this research will be not only to create robust, research-based foundations
for these classroom systems, but also to think of ways that we can expand to new contexts. We
can’t do that without ways of assessing which aspects of the programs are the most impactful and
successful, and that’s where this summer’s research team comes in. Depending on how far we
get in summer, the products of this research will hopefully be able to be submitted to
conference(s) sponsored by math education and math teaching organizations. I hope to hear from
many of you soon!