So after hearing feedback from Dr. Mac's comment about technology use and steering me away from my general secondary topic of seating arrangement, I think I've begun to focus specifically on calculator use. I have recently begun further investigations on ERIC on the general subjects of Mathematics and Calculator use. There have been a variety of results coming back to me in articles about student use to teacher expectations, attitudes, classroom use, and much more. This is a topic with many previous issues analyzed, which is very exciting to learn from previous experience. It is still a broad idea and may need to be focused on a specific type of mathematical subject like geometry or algebra where calculator use may already be more prevalent. It is also still interest to pursue students and teachers varying response and how that might relate to student achievement. I would assume a graphing calculator is a standard form used by students like my high school experience beyond a scientific calculator, but that might need to be specified or based on convenience of my sample.
As discussed before focusing on calculator use might follow a survey of teachers to see how they use and encourage the use of a calculator in their classes, and also a survey on student attitudes toward using the calculator in the classroom and knowledge of calculator use. Follow up information might come from in class observations of select classrooms and possible interviews if necessary of either students and teachers, but currently not thinking of needing the interviews. Finally, the use of EOC scores to relate achievement or at least how I want to define it as a standardized form across the multiple schools I'm sure to be using in my sample.
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OK, Matt. I like the idea of a study based on calculator use. What you need to do at this point is come up with a specific questions (an angle) for your study. As you say, there have been many studies of calculator use. NCTM insists that each student should have access to a calculator. The math EOC tests in this state are calculator-active, so you will find that classroom sets and individual calculators are the norm.
What I think we don't know enough about is how and how successfully calculators are used in teaching and learning. There are suggestions and recommendations, but scarce research on outcomes. You might collect data from either teachers or students. See if you can form a research question based on the studies you are reading.
Matt,
I really like your idea of researching calculator use in the classroom. Thinking back to my days in math class, the calculator always caused some sort of controversy, which may be why it has been extensively researched. But based on our new ed psych principles and the observations we did in class today, it might be interesting to see how much of plugging into a calculator really is learning or if it is simple recall or rote memorization. Do students really understand what is going on when taught to rely on the calculator? Do they have to have a fairly deep level of understanding about the math principles to plug values in correctly? This past week tutoring may have given you some ideas, since using the calculator seems to have been strongly emphasized.
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