After reading the Quiz article What Makes Educational Research “Educational”?, I’ve been thinking a lot about research that probes into the instructional dynamic, the ‘arrows’ of the instructional triangle. As Ball and Forzani, the authors of the article, stated, it is important to know about the teacher, the learner, and the content, but it is also necessary to understand the interactions between the three. Looking back at my research ideas that I generated in my first blog, I keep coming back to the topic of incorporating reading and writing with the math curriculum. I have been curious to learn more about this ever since I took an undergraduate course in Literacy. The class was for all secondary education majors. I thought it was silly that I, a math major, had to take a class on reading and writing for my subject area. In my own experience, I had done very little reading and writing in my mathematics courses, so I found myself questioning why I needed to know how to teach reading and writing. At the end of the semester, my understanding of using reading and writing in my content area was still very surface level, but it was enough to spark my interest in this topic. If I were to choose this topic, I can not decide if I should pursue it under experimental research: if a teacher uses writing in his/her math classroom, will the students’ understandings of the material increase? Is there any effect at all? These research questions seem to be aligned with Ball and Forzani’s idea of research in education, since it investigates the interaction between the learner, the teacher, and the content. This seems like a very challenging study though, since I would have to find a teacher that would be willing to adapt his/her teaching methods. It would also be very time intensive. As a related topic, perhaps I could approach it as a correlational study: is there a relationship between students’ skills in reading and writing and their performance in math (i.e. word problems)? And still another option is to use a survey. As Dr. McCoy mentioned in class, a lot of us may choose to conduct research via survey. It might be more practical to use this method, but I’m not sure what I would want to pose as the question. Those are just the ideas for a quantitative study! In approaching this topic as a qualitative study, perhaps I could interview students to understand their thought processes as they read word problems. I guess in writing all of this, I’ve realized I still have a long way to go in finding a topic! But hopefully I’m on the right track!
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Lindsey, you are definitely on the right track. I appreciate that you are applying what you read in the Ball and Foranzi article. Reading and writing in mathematics teaching and learning is an ideal place to start. Your challenge is to define a specific question that you want to study. We do have math vocabulary, and there are varied ways to teach it, with varied results. There is also the issue of word problems and whether students have trouble with them because of poor reading skills or poor math skills. This is something that the principal at Atkins mentioned the other day. I would suggest that you use ERIC to find studies on this topic to see how it has been studied in the past. I like this topic.
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