Middle school math students take part in a research project

The Weiser Middle School math department is participating in a research project working with the Boise State University ROOT (Research Order of Teaching) project. Funded by a $3 million grant from the NSF, ROOT is a teacher-researcher alliance of Idaho educators working to improve middle school grades math achievement in modeling and problem solving.
 The middle school math department began looking into the project early in the 2019-2020 school year, when BSU sent a query looking for math teachers willing to make a three year commitment to the project.  The Weiser teachers decided they wanted to participate to keep the cohesion of the department going and because they were each genuinely interested in improving their own teaching as they discover for themselves which teaching practices are the most effective.
 The goal of the project is to test which order to teach math concepts as it matters to student success.  The teachers have been learning about two different effective philosophies, Explicit Attention to Concepts (EAC) and Support Opportunities to Struggle (SOS). The study is meant to determine which is the best order, EAC first or SOS first.  
 Explicit Attention to Concepts allows math teachers to use practices that directly draw students’ attention to concepts, connections among facts, procedures, and ideas, they help students develop habits of reasoning that go beyond memorization, recall, and application of skills.
 Student Opportunities to Struggle provides students with time to struggle, expend effort to make sense of graspable content, by overcoming points of confusion. This concept can stimulate personal sense-making skills, build habits of perseverance and promote students’ openness to challenges.
 Throughout the year, the department will develop mini studies in each classroom, honing their own teaching skills at both philosophies as well as practicing different types of study including intervention, comparison, or crossover study. For each unit the teachers administer a pretest and posttest and, in case of crossover, conduct a mid assessment and report the results to BSU.
 There are over 100 middle school teachers in Idaho participating.  BSU has provided each school with regional math specialists who approve the plans. The department met for training twice in 2019 before the COVID-19 lockdown and once in 2020 via Zoom with the specialist. The specialist also came out and spent a day with the teachers  as they were setting up for the first mini study.   
 One example of the study is from seventh grade math teacher Pat Matteri who began a 16 lesson “cross-over” study with her math students to see the advantage and effectiveness of “specifically connecting to more than one representation of an idea: a) connect symbolic and visual representations, and b) create visual representations of word problems.”  
 Through the use of a set of instructional strategies, Matteri has presented ways to make more than one connection to an idea with a “test” group.
 With the “control” classes she is presenting the same information without the extra connection. The students first were all given a pretest. After the eighth lesson, the students will be given the same test. The groups will then be switched in the extent to which they are given connection strategies and models for the remaining eight lessons. All students will be given the post test. The individual answers are being recorded and the data given to ROOT.  
 The hope is that the Explicit Attention to Concepts focus that Matteri has chosen to test will be a part of a larger body of information that forms the basis of improved instruction.  
 “I’m currently a few lessons into my study, and anxious to see how my students benefit,” Matteri said.