National Attention to Effective Mathematics Instruction
To provide advice to Congress on what constitutes a successful STEM school, the National Research Council’s Board on Science Education and Board on Testing and Assessment held a workshop in Washington, DC over the past two days. Dr. Jere Confrey, FI Senior Research Fellow and Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education, was invited to testify to a committee of experts in STEM learning and teaching, providing evidence and commentary about successful STEM education in K-12 schools.
The workshop experts were charged by the National Research Council to describe and reflect on:
- four categories of school types that provide STEM education
- data that speak to K-12 school and program effectiveness
- current research aimed at understanding elements and practices that constitute effective K-12 STEM education and how implementation of these elements and practices can contribute to successful STEM schools.
“The Conference went beyond emphasizing the need for improvements in STEM education to identifying the trends in research and practice with scientifically-based evidence of how to get results," said Confrey. "It addressed organizational factors at school and district level, professional development approaches, all the way to classroom practices that produce results. And it showed the importance of opening the pipeline to STEM careers for all students.”
Confrey presented a paper, co-authored with Dr. Alan Maloney, FI Senior Research Fellow, titled “Engineering [for] Effectiveness in Mathematics Education: Intervention at the Instructional Core in an Era of Common Core Standards.”
This paper reviews three major, recent studies that examined curricular effectiveness to show that what is learned from those studies goes far beyond simple causal effects. Confrey and Maloney argue that the instructional core—the daily classroom activities of implementing a curriculum, carrying out instruction and applying formative assessment practices—is a complex system. Any studies of the effectiveness of curricula should recognize this complexity and leverage current technological capabilities to analyze such systems in an ongoing way.
“Considering the characteristics of complex systems, the question ‘Is this curriculum effective?’ is less useful than the more nuanced and flexible query, ‘what works, in what context, and for whom?’” noted Confrey. “One of the major impacts of [the studies] is their demonstration that the instructional core is in fact a complex system and what we need to do is to put in place data systems monitoring curricular use, diagnosing student learning, and capturing implementation factors and professional development strategies and then engineer [for] effectiveness. The key in a complex system is to build for improvement in an adaptable way.”
The paper presentation concluded with a set of recommendations for engineering technologically-enabled systems of data collection to improve the effectiveness of the instructional core for students and teachers, by:
- gathering more complete types and quantities of data about what is happening in classrooms,
- seeking to become aware when a school’s or a district’s instructional system exhibits patterns or trends of improvement, stagnation, or deterioration over time, and
- seeking to learn how to drive the complex instructional systems towards improvement.
For more information about the work of Drs. Confrey and Maloney please see: Dr. Jere Confrey or Dr. Alan Maloney.