The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of Education

STUDENTS’ CONCEPTIONS OF MATHEMATICS

AS SENSIBLE (SCOMAS) FRAMEWORK

A Dissertation in

Curriculum and Instruction

by

Maureen M. Grady

 2013 Maureen M. Grady

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2013
The dissertation of Maureen M. Grady was reviewed and approved* by the following:

E. Frances Arbaugh
Associate Professor of Education
Dissertation Advisor
Chair of Committee

Glendon W. Blume
Professor of Education
Curriculum and Instruction Graduate Coordinator

Gwendolyn M. Lloyd
Professor of Education

Andrea McCloskey
Assistant Professor of Education

Kai A. Schafft
Associate Professor Of Education/Rural Sociology

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

ii
 ABSTRACT

This study describes the development of the Students’ Conceptions of Mathematics as

Sensible (SCOMAS) Framework and its application to the study of the conceptions of

mathematics as sensible of students in a secondary mathematics classroom. The SCOMAS

Framework begins with indicators that students conceive of mathematics as sensible and

provides a categorization of these indicators into five types of student activity. Utilizing

indicators and categories of activity the SCOMAS Framework provides a tool for documenting

students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible.

This study begins with a description of the methods used to develop an initial framework

of indicators from the research literature. It then describes how the initial framework was used

to investigate the conceptions of mathematics in a 9th grade algebra classroom. The study reports

on the use of the initial framework as a tool to describe the dimensions of students’ conceptions

of mathematics as sensible and the changes in those conceptions over the course of an academic

year. Finally, the study reports on how analysis of the classroom data helped shape the initial

framework into the final SCOMAS Framework.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi

List of Tables ........................................................................................................................... viii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. ix

Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1

Research questions ........................................................................................................... 4

Rationale for the study ..................................................................................................... 6
Theoretical considerations ............................................................................................... 8

Chapter 2 Literature Review .................................................................................................... 13

Definitions ........................................................................................................................ 14
The landscape of the literature on beliefs and conceptions .............................................. 17
Studies of a broad spectrum of beliefs and conceptions .................................................. 18
Studies focused on conceptions of mathematics .............................................................. 19
What conceptions do students have about the nature of mathematics? ........................... 26
What can this study add?.................................................................................................. 30

Chapter 3 Development of the Initial Framework of Indicators .............................................. 31

Generating indicators from the literature ......................................................................... 31

Initial testing of the list of indicators ............................................................................... 40
Literature in the framework categories ............................................................................ 44
Explaining ................................................................................................................ 45
Strategizing............................................................................................................... 46
Making Connections ................................................................................................ 47
Assuming Authority: ................................................................................................ 48
Other Observation Frameworks: ...................................................................................... 50

Chapter 4 Research Methods for Phase 2 ................................................................................ 52

Selecting the setting ......................................................................................................... 52

The setting ........................................................................................................................ 53
Participants ....................................................................................................................... 54
Daily pattern in the classroom.......................................................................................... 55
Data collected ................................................................................................................... 56
Preexisting data ........................................................................................................ 57
Data collected during spring observation ................................................................. 58
Analysis of classroom data............................................................................................... 62
Analysis of student interviews ......................................................................................... 65
Trustworthiness ................................................................................................................ 66

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Chapter 5 Findings ................................................................................................................... 68

Findings related to expecting explanations ...................................................................... 68

Types of Evidence .................................................................................................... 68
Providing explanations ............................................................................................. 69
Seeking explanations ................................................................................................ 86
Summary .................................................................................................................. 90
Findings related to expecting connections ....................................................................... 91
Types of evidence..................................................................................................... 91
Connections within mathematics.............................................................................. 92
Connections between mathematics and other contexts ............................................ 102
Summary .................................................................................................................. 111
Findings related to strategizing ........................................................................................ 112
Types of evidence..................................................................................................... 112
Strategizing when problem solving .......................................................................... 113
Alternative strategies ................................................................................................ 117
Role of memory in mathematics .............................................................................. 123
Summary .................................................................................................................. 127
Findings related to mathematical authority ...................................................................... 127
Types of evidence..................................................................................................... 127
Assuming authority .................................................................................................. 128
Ceding authority ....................................................................................................... 131
Mathematics as authoritative .................................................................................... 132
Summary .................................................................................................................. 133
Findings related to stating that mathematics makes sense ............................................... 134

Chapter 6 Discussion ............................................................................................................... 135

Assertions based on findings ............................................................................................ 135

Research question 1 .................................................................................................. 135
Research question 2 .................................................................................................. 136
Significance of the study .................................................................................................. 136
Evolution of the framework ............................................................................................. 141
Changes to the indicators ......................................................................................... 142
Changes to the framework........................................................................................ 143
Challenges in studying students’ conceptions of mathematics ........................................ 144
Limitations of survey items ...................................................................................... 145
Limitations of interviews ......................................................................................... 151
Implications of this study ......................................................................................... 154
Suggestions for further study ........................................................................................... 155

References ................................................................................................................................ 157

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 LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1-1. Beliefs and conceptions and their relation to productive disposition. .................. 6

Figure 1-2. Multilevel Mediational Framework of Instructional Quality and Effectiveness. . 9

Figure 1-3. A portion of Reusser’s (2001) Framework. .......................................................... 10

Figure 1-4. The work of teaching............................................................................................ 11

Figure 1-5. The work of teaching conceptions....................................................................... 12

Figure 2-1. Relationship between beliefs and conceptions .................................................... 16

Figure 2-2. Framework of Student Conceptions of Mathematics. .......................................... 20

Figure 2-3. Intercorrelative relations between the dimensions ............................................... 22

Figure 2-4. Relationship between conceptions. . .................................................................... 22

Figure 2-5 Conceptions of Mathematics ................................................................................ 23

Figure 3-1 – Initial Framework ............................................................................................... 43

Figure 4-1. What the video shows........................................................................................... 57

Figure 4-2. Conceptions cards for student interviews. ............................................................ 61

Figure 4-3 Studiocode coding scheme. ................................................................................... 63

Table 4-1 – Sample incident detail .......................................................................................... 64

Figure 4-4 – Comparison of Fall and Spring Combined Timelines. ....................................... 65

Figure 5-1. Warm-up problem – Find the area........................................................................ 71

Figure 5-2. Warm-up problem – What fraction is this? ......................................................... 79

Figure 5-3. Warm-up problem. What’s my area? ................................................................. 80

Figure 5-4. Board problem: finding f(x)................................................................................. 81

Figure 5-5. Warm-up problem. Angles of a perfect pentagon. ............................................. 82

Figure 5-7. Clock face labeled in degrees. .............................................................................. 93

Figure 5-8. Expression with exponents to simplify................................................................ 97

Figure 5-9. What does this trapezoid look like?..................................................................... 103

Figure 5-10. Demonstrating height equals wingspan. ............................................................ 106

vi
Figure 5-11. Side view of bridge............................................................................................ 109

Figure 5-12. Area of concave hexagon. ................................................................................. 118

Figure 5-13. An alternative dissection of the concave hexagon............................................. 119

Figure 5-14. A second alternative dissection of the concave hexagon. ................................. 119

Figure 6-1. The work of teaching……………………………………………………………137

Figure 6-2. Students’ Conceptions of Mathematics as Sensible (SCOMAS) Framework ..... 144

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 LIST OF TABLES
Table 3-1 – Sources used to generate indicators. .................................................................... 33

Table 3-2 – Representative sources for indicators .................................................................. 37

Table 3-3. List of indicators .................................................................................................... 39

Table 3-4 – Sources of Indicators............................................................................................ 40

viii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation has been such a central part of my life for the last several years that

everyone around me has become an accomplice in this work, willing or unwilling. Some

volunteered for the journey. My adviser, Fran Arbaugh, knew even better than I what she was

taking on and stepped forward anyway. I will always be grateful for her support, her

encouragement, her patience, her insight, and her humor. She was, for me, the perfect adviser

who came along at the perfect time. My dissertation committee members were also more aware

than I of the journey for which they volunteered yet each readily agreed to serve and have been a

valuable source of challenge, assistance, and support. The teacher and students participating in

this study, although all volunteered, probably had little idea what they were getting themselves

into. Despite this, they have been unfailingly cheerful and gracious. They not only allowed me

into their classroom, they took over running recording equipment, eagerly participated in

interviews, and made me feel like a welcome part of their community.

For every person who volunteered to travel this journey with me, there is one who came

along because they were a part of my life and this was the path on which I was traveling. My

family and friends have listened to my whining, been patient with both my physical and mental

absences, and provide the emotional and practical support that I needed to continue along rocky

patches in the road. When I moved into town to begin my doctoral program, I’m sure my new

neighbors had no idea what living near a graduate student was going to do to their lives. I was

blessed with great neighbors. When I was too distracted by my work to tend to details of my life

they mowed the lawn, fed baby goats, relit the furnace, brought me food, moved boxes, and fixed

plumbing. The help of my family, friends, and neighbors made my work possible.

ix
 Finally, there are the people at the Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and

Learning. Kathy Heid enticed me onto the path and she and the other faculty and staff supported

and challenged me along the way. My fellow graduate students have proved to be great

travelling companions. We have shared joys and sorrows, excitement and frustration, success

and failure.

It is only with the help of all of these fellow travelers that I have made this journey and I

thank each one of you for your contribution.

x
 Chapter 1 Introduction

Recent calls for reform in mathematics education have espoused ambitious goals for how

students should interact with school mathematics. The National Council of Teachers of

Mathematics (NCTM) has proffered a vision of school mathematics in which “Students

confidently engage in complex mathematical tasks,” “draw on knowledge from a wide variety of

mathematical topics,” and “value mathematics and engage actively in learning it” (NCTM, 2000,

p. 3). The Standards for Mathematical Practice of the Common Core State Standards for

Mathematics (CCSS-M) call for students to “make sense of problems and persevere in solving

them,” “reason abstractly and quantitatively,” “construct viable arguments and critique the

reasoning of others,” “model with mathematics,” “use appropriate tools strategically,” “attend to

precision,” “look for and make use of structure,” and “express regularity in repeated reasoning”

(National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO],

2010, pp. 6-8). These visions and standards go far beyond a traditional view of school

mathematics in which students are expected to learn procedures and definitions by listening to

the teacher, taking notes, and then practicing the procedures. Cobb, Wood, Yackel, and McNeal

(1992) described these two very different classroom mathematics traditions and, following

Richards’ (1991) terminology, called them school mathematics and inquiry mathematics. These

calls for mathematics education to look more like the inquiry mathematics of mathematicians

and less like the school mathematics that is probably familiar to many Americans have been

echoed by many prominent mathematics educators (e.g., Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995; Hiebert et.

al., 1997; Romberg, Carpenter, Dremock, 2005; Schoenfeld, 1994) and might be best described

by Harel (2010) who wrote, “[t]he ultimate goal of instruction in mathematics is to help students

1
develop ways of understanding and ways of thinking that are compatible with those practiced by

contemporary mathematicians” (p. 91). This is, indeed, an ambitious goal.

Part of this ambitious goal for mathematics education is for students to develop

mathematical proficiency along five different strands. The National Research Council’s (NRC)

Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics (2001) document contains a description of

the five interwoven strands of mathematical proficiency:

• conceptual understanding—comprehension of mathematical concepts, operations,

and relations;

• procedural fluency—skill in carrying out procedures flexibly, accurately, efficiently,

and appropriately;

• strategic competence—ability to formulate, represent, and solve mathematical

problems;

• adaptive reasoning—capacity for logical thought, reflection, explanation, and

justification; and

• productive disposition—habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful,

and worthwhile, coupled with a belief in diligence and one’s own efficacy. (p. 5)

The authors of this document argue that each of these strands is essential for mathematical

proficiency and that each develops in conjunction with the other strands. The metaphor used in

Adding It Up is that of a multistrand rope in which the strands are twisted together and weakness

in any strand weakens the entire rope. In this view of mathematical proficiency no strand stands

alone and all are important for the development of the others.

At the heart of the ambitious view of mathematics learning is the conception of

mathematics as a sensible, connected system that can be reasoned about, understood, and

2
expanded upon. The term conception is used here to denote a truth held by students that is

assumed to be primarily cognitive, as opposed to affective, in nature. (For further elaboration,

see the section on definitions of beliefs and conceptions.) If students do not have a conception of

mathematics as a sensible, connected system it is unlikely that they will, as the CCSS-M

Standards for Mathematical Practice demand, “look for and make use of structure” in

mathematics (NGA & CCSSO, 2010, p. 8) or develop ways of understanding and thinking about

mathematics “compatible with those practiced by contemporary mathematicians” (Harel, 2010,

p. 91). Despite the critical importance of such a conception of mathematics, both research and

anecdotal evidence reveal that many students in the United States and other countries lack such a

view of mathematics (Muis, 2004).

Also central to this ambitious view of mathematics education is the assertion that this

type of mathematical proficiency is critical not just for gifted or college-intending students but

for all students. The NCTM calls for “ambitious expectations for all,” asserting that “there is no

conflict between equity and excellence” (NCTM, 2000, p. 3). Adding It Up asserts that,

“mathematics is a realm no longer restricted to a select few. All young Americans must learn to

think mathematically, and they must think mathematically to learn (NRC, 2001, p.1) and CCSS-

M states that, “all students must have the opportunity to learn and meet the same high standards

if they are to access the knowledge and skills necessary in their post-school lives” (p. 4). Given

the emphasis on equity in mathematics education, it is important that we study the conceptions of

mathematics as sensible of low achieving mathematics students as well as those of students who

have been more successful in mathematics.

To date, the research in this area has been based predominantly on students’ self-reports.

Absent from the literature is an empirically based tool that allows researchers and teachers to

3
assess students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible through observation. Thus, the aim of

this study is to establish, through systematic and rigorous inquiry, a framework of observable,

action-based indicators that students conceive of mathematics as sensible. This was

accomplished through a two-phase investigation. In Phase 1, I conducted a thorough and

systematic investigation of the existing literature on conceptions of mathematics in order to

identify indicators. I then arranged those indicators into a preliminary framework. In Phase 2 of

this study, I used the framework as a research tool to examine student conceptions in a secondary

mathematics classroom in which students appear to have developed a conception of mathematics

as a sensible system. I then adapted the original framework based on my analysis of classroom

data, culminating with the Students’ Conceptions of Mathematics as Sensible (SCOMAS)

Framework, a framework that has its roots in both the research literature and classroom data.

Research questions

The purpose of this study was to develop a framework for indicators that students see

mathematics as sensible. In particular, this study used the current literature on conceptions of

mathematics to develop a initial framework of indicators generally accepted as indicating that

students have a conception of mathematics as sensible, used this framework to examine the ways

in which students in one purposefully chosen secondary mathematics classroom conceive of

mathematics as sensible, and modified the initial framework based on findings from this

classroom. This study, then, addressed the overarching question: What do students’ actions in a

mathematics classroom tell us about students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible?

Specifically, the following research questions guided this study:

4
 • What constructs exist in the current literature on students’ conceptions of mathematics

that can be used to construct indicators of students’ conception of mathematics as

sensible?

The findings from this research question were used to create a framework for studying students’

conceptions as they were displayed in a classroom setting and this investigation was guided by

the following research question

• In what ways is the framework a viable tool for documenting students’ conceptions? In

what ways does it illuminate students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible?

In these research questions and throughout this study I use the term “sensible” in relation

to conceptions of mathematics to denote a view that mathematics is a connected, coherent system

in which there are reasons for such things as rules, procedures, and formulas, whether or not the

individual yet knows or understands the reasons. This view of mathematics contrasts with a

view of mathematics as consisting of arbitrary, disconnected rules and procedures; within such a

conception of mathematics, individuals must be told everything they need to know and

remembering this knowledge plays a key role in the learning of mathematics.

The conception of mathematics as sensible is one part of the productive disposition strand

of mathematical proficiency and is related to conceptions about the nature of mathematical

knowledge and the nature of mathematical activity as described by Grouws, Howard, &

Colangelo (1996). Figure 1-1 shows an overview of the structure of conceptions and beliefs

related to mathematics education and where productive disposition and conceptions of

mathematics as sensible fit within that structure.

5
Figure 1-1-1. Beliefs and conceptions and their relation to productive disposition.

Of the four categories of beliefs and conceptions related to mathematics education

common in the literature the categories conceptions of mathematics and beliefs about self in

relation to mathematics, are part of the productive disposition strand of mathematical

proficiency. The category conceptions of mathematics, according to Grouws, Howard, &

Colangelo (1996) breaks down into five components the first three of which, composition of

mathematical knowledge, structure of mathematical knowledge, and status of mathematical

knowledge are components of the construct that I refer to as the conception of mathematics as

sensible.

Rationale for the study

Students’ conceptions of the nature of mathematics are important because they are part of

what educators have defined as mathematical proficiency. The productive disposition strand of

mathematical proficiency begins by stating that part of what it means to be proficient in

mathematics is to have “the tendency to see sense in mathematics” (NRC, 2001, p. 131).

Students’ conceptions of mathematics are also important because a view of mathematics as

6
sensible plays an important role in the other strands of mathematical proficiency. A student’s

conception of mathematics is linked to that student’s ability to and likeliness to strategize about

mathematical problem solving (Wong, Marton, Wong, Lam, 2002), that is, in the development of

the strategic competence strand of mathematical proficiency. The adaptive reasoning strand, in

which students are expected to provide explanation and justification, relies on a sufficiently

sensible system of mathematics to expect that such explanations and justifications exist. Finally,

the interwoven nature of the strands of the mathematical proficiency means that no strand can

fully develop separate from other strands. Thus, the development of productive disposition,

including the need for students for see mathematics as sensible, is critical for the development of

all strands of mathematical proficiency.

Given the importance of the development of students’ conceptions of mathematics as a

sensible system and the consensus that many students lack such a conception, it is important that

we find ways to study students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible. Researchers have made

considerable progress in understanding the types of conceptions that students have about

mathematics, mathematics learning, and themselves as mathematics learners (e.g., Kloosterman

& Stage, 1992; Op ’t Eynde, De Corte, & Verschaffel, 2002; Schoenfeld, 1989). However, the

conception of mathematics as a sensible system has not been sufficiently operationalized to

identify what might be taken as evidence of this conception in students. Without such a way to

identify whether students conceive of mathematics as sensible and the different ways in which

students demonstrate this conception, research on instructional practices and on the development

of such a conception is limited to describing practices that might reasonably be expected to help

develop conceptions of mathematics as sensible. In this study, I use the extant literature on

students’ conception of mathematics as sensible and data about student actions in the classroom

7
to develop a framework for studying this conception and for conceptualizing several different

categories in which students provide indicators of such a conception. It is expected that this

study will provide a valuable tool for researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to use for

assessing students’ development in this critical area of mathematical proficiency.

Theoretical considerations

This study is conceived as an initial stage for a larger research agenda seeking to connect

instructional practices to the development of productive disposition in mathematics students. In

discussing the theoretical considerations of this study I will begin with the theoretical

underpinning for my larger research agenda. I will then narrow the focus to the theoretical basis

for this particular study.

Central to my research agenda is the assumption that instructional practices have an

impact on student learning. This assumption does not imply that instructional practices are the

only factor or that the impact of instructional practices on student learning is a simple, direct

relationship. In the process–product paradigm of educational research there was an assumption

that we could identify the processes in teaching that lead to desirable products in student learning

and teach all teachers to use these processes. Educational researchers have come to see that

teaching is a far more complex endeavor than could be described by a series of teaching moves;

it involves teacher characteristics, students characteristics, environment, culture, support

systems, and more. Figure 1-2 displays a model of some of the variables related to student

outcomes in school and how they interact.

8
Figure 1-2. Multilevel Mediational Framework of Instructional Quality and Effectiveness (Reusser,
2001).

One danger in a view that is this complex is that we begin to see teaching as so complex

and contextualized that every classroom, every teacher, and every student are seen as dissimilar

to others and, thus, there can be no recommended practices, no guiding principles for practice—

in essence, no craft or science of teaching. This research agenda, then, will focus in on the

classroom instruction as it affects one particular aspect of the “multi-dimensional outcomes of

instruction” (Reusser, 2001). The choice to focus on classroom instruction rests on two

assumptions. First, classroom instruction is one of the features in the complex system over

which educators can hope to exert substantial influence. Second, as shown in the design of the

model in Figure 1-2, classroom instruction is, in many ways, a node through which other factors

9
are influenced and exert influences on learning. Ingvarson, Beavis, Bishop, Peck, and Elsworth

(2004), in their study of teaching and learning in Australian schools, found that “teacher

practices were consistently the most powerful predictors of mathematics achievement growth,

and with growth in affective student outcomes” (p. 71). For these reasons, the research agenda

will focus on the portion of the model shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-1-2. A portion of Reusser’s (2001) Framework.

Having situated the agenda in a specific portion of the model that represents the

relationship between instructional practice and student learning, we are still left with the problem

of trying to understand and study that connection. Hiebert and Grouws (2007) state that one of

the major challenges faced by researchers who seek to study connections between teaching and

learning is that “theories that specify the ways in which the key components of teaching fit

together to form an interactive, dynamic system for achieving particular learning goals have not

been sufficiently developed to guide research efforts that can build over time” (p. 373). They

also identify several methodological challenges facing researchers, including: a) the difficulty of

10
accounting for relevant factors in a setting in which there are so many factors, and b) the

challenge of creating appropriate measures of learning and teaching.

Lampert (2001) proposed a “representation of the work of teaching” (p. 30) in which she

identified the “problem spaces” of teaching and learning as those elements of practice that

connect teacher to student, teacher to content, student to content, and teacher to student practice

(see Figure 1-4).

Figure 1-1-3. The work of teaching (Lampert, 2001, p. 33)

The arc of practice across the three arrows from teacher to student, practice, and content is

intended to indicate that these problem spaces of teaching and learning are not independent

problem spaces but that they interact with one another. The arrow between student and content

represents what Lampert refers to as “studying”—using this term in a broad sense to indicate the

ways in which students engage with the content. In this study, the content under consideration is

not a particular topic or subject in mathematics but rather the conception of mathematics as

sensible (see Figure 1-5).

11
Figure 1-1-4. The work of teaching conceptions.

In brief, for this study I will focus on the problem space between student and conceptions

of mathematics as sensible, seeking to identify and categorize indicators that students are

engaged in the practice of learning to see mathematics as a sensible system. These practices

might include ways in which students talk about mathematics, the types of questions that

students see as reasonable to ask about mathematics, and how students engage in doing

mathematics. It is hoped that a better understanding of this problem space between students and

their conceptions of mathematics will permit teachers to look more closely at an important

outcome of their instructional practices and provide researchers with a tool to more directly

examine students’ conceptions of mathematics.

12
 Chapter 2 Literature Review

This study examines students’ conceptions about mathematics as sensible. I will review

the literature on conceptions related to mathematics education with special attention to the

literature on conceptions of the nature of mathematics. I begin by trying to bring some clarity to

the definition and use of the terms conceptions and beliefs and the relationship between them. I

then discuss studies that examined the full spectrum of beliefs and conceptions related to

mathematics education before focusing in on the first category, conceptions about mathematics

(see Figure 1-1 for a layout of the categories). I outline the methods used to investigate

conceptions of mathematics and the research findings about common student conceptions of

mathematics. I end this section by describing the work that has been done linking student

conceptions to student outcomes and the results of studies that have sought to identify influences

on the development or change of student conceptions.

Over the past three decades, many mathematics education researchers have studied the

nature and content of teachers’ and students’ beliefs and conceptions and their relationship to

learning and teaching. Although the focus of this study is on students’ conceptions, the research

methods used to explore the nature and content of beliefs and conceptions of teachers and

students are so similar that, when considering the nature and content of beliefs and conceptions, I

will not distinguish between research about teachers and research about students. The distinction

will not become important until the discussion of the effects of beliefs and conceptions, at which

time I focus on effects on student learning. Before going further in the discussion, it is necessary

to discuss definitions of beliefs and conceptions.

13
 Definitions

Despite Pajares’ (1992) call to clean up the “messy construct” of beliefs in educational

research and Philipp’s (2007) attempt to organize and define terms related to beliefs,

conceptions, knowledge, and affect, a lack of consensus still remains about the differences and

the relationship between beliefs and conceptions. A number of working definitions of beliefs

currently exist in the mathematics education literature. A common thread in these definitions is

the notion that beliefs are about what an individual holds to be true about a particular subject.

More problematic is the question of whether beliefs are more cognitive or affective in nature.

Schoenfeld (1992) defines beliefs as “an individual’s understandings and feelings that shape the

ways that the individual conceptualizes and engages in mathematical behavior” (p. 338). Ponte

(1994) states that beliefs have “a strong affective component and evaluative component” (p. 5).

Philipp (2007), in his table of terminology, places beliefs towards the affective end on the

spectrum but makes clear that, “beliefs are more cognitive, are felt less intensely, and are harder

to change than attitudes” (p. 259). At the other end of the spectrum, Sumpter (2009) states that,

“beliefs are primarily cognitive” (p. 5). She responds to Schoenfeld’s (1992) definition by

stating “I like to exclude emotions from the definition of belief since the same belief may be

connected with different emotions for different individuals” (Sumpter, 2009, p. 5).

The relative roles played by affect and cognition are also critical considerations when

researchers attempt to define conceptions and to differentiate between beliefs and conceptions.

Researchers who differentiate between beliefs and conceptions based on the role of cognition

and affect generally identify conceptions as more cognitively based than beliefs. Pehkonen

(2004) states, “In the case of conceptions, the cognitive component of beliefs is stressed, whereas

in basic (primitive) beliefs the affective component is emphasized” (p. 3). Ponte (1994) states

14
that conceptions are “essentially cognitive in nature” (p. 1994) and Philipp (2007) places

conceptions closer to the cognitive end of the spectrum than beliefs.

Pehkonen (1995), having defined conceptions as essentially cognitive in nature, states

that,

in accordance with Saari (1983), we explain here conceptions as conscious beliefs, i.e.

we understand conceptions as a subset of beliefs. Thus, for us, conceptions are higher

order beliefs which are based on reasoning processes for which the premises are

conscious. (p. 12)

Interestingly, although Philipp (2007) seems to agree that conceptions are more cognitive in

nature than are beliefs, he joins many other researchers (e.g., Dahlgren Johansson & Sumpter,

2010; Sumpter, 2009; Thompson, 1992) in asserting that conceptions is the more general term,

that is, conceptions are “viewed as a more general mental structure, encompassing beliefs,

meaning, concepts, propositions, rules, mental images, preference, and the like” (Thompson,

1992, p. 130). Ponte (1994) separates beliefs and conceptions by their cognitive versus affective

nature and states that “both beliefs and conceptions are part of knowledge” (p. 5). Figure 2-1

shows the relative relationships beliefs and conceptions envisioned by various researchers.

15
Figure 2-1. Relationship between beliefs and conceptions

Clearly, there is a lack of consensus in the literature about the definition of conceptions

and beliefs and the relationship between these two constructs. Some researchers choose not to

address the relationship between conceptions and knowledge and use only one of the terms or to

use the terms interchangeably. Even Thompson (1992), who defines beliefs as a subset of

conceptions, indicates that the distinction may not be very important and that her use of the terms

is often a matter of convenience. She states, “Though the distinction may not be a terribly

important one, it will be more natural at times to refer to a teacher’s conception of mathematics

as a discipline than to simply speak of the teachers’ beliefs about mathematics” (Thompson,

1992, p. 130).

Throughout this review, I will use beliefs and conceptions somewhat interchangeably,

tending to use the language used by the particular researchers. However, in the larger study, I

choose to follow Ponte’s view of beliefs and conceptions and treat them as two somewhat

separate constructs with beliefs being more related to affect and conceptions being more

16
cognitive in nature. Since this study focuses on students’ views of the nature of mathematics,

and I take these views to be essentially cognitive in nature, I refer to these views as conceptions.

I agree, however, with Thompson (1992) that the distinction may not be critical since it may be

impossible, in any specific case, to determine how much a view is affective in nature and how

much the view is cognitive in nature.

The landscape of the literature on beliefs and conceptions

Although studies about beliefs and conceptions related to mathematics education utilize a

variety of schema, the research on beliefs and conceptions can be grouped into four categories:

conceptions of mathematics, beliefs about self in relation to mathematics, beliefs about

mathematics teaching, and beliefs about mathematics learning. Due to the complex relationship

between these categories and the multiple ways of interpreting questions and indicators,

however, the distinction between these categories is not always clear. For example, one

problematic category used in some studies (e.g., Kloosterman & Stage, 1992; Schommer-Aikins,

Duell, & Hutter, 2005) is beliefs about problem solving. In the Indiana Mathematics Beliefs

Scales (Kloosterman & Stage, 1992), one of the beliefs is “Word problems are important in

mathematics” (p. 115). This statement describes the nature and content of mathematics, so it

would seem to fit into conceptions of mathematics. However, one of the indicators within the

belief is “Math classes should not emphasize word problems” (p. 115) which could easily be

interpreted as a belief about mathematics teaching rather than about mathematics. Despite the

challenges of defining categories across such a range of beliefs and conceptions, many

researchers have chosen to look across these broad categories.

17
 Studies of a broad spectrum of beliefs and conceptions

Most of the researchers who have studied such a broad range of beliefs and conceptions

have used questionnaires or surveys, usually ones that relied heavily upon Likert-scale type

items. Many of these questionnaires are based on two popular instruments, the Indiana

Mathematical Beliefs Scales (Kloosterman and Stage, 1992) and Schoenfeld’s (1989)

questionnaire. The Indiana Mathematical Beliefs Scales, designed to measure high school and

college students’ beliefs about problem solving, is designed around five beliefs “related to

motivation and thus achievement on mathematics problem solving” (Kloosterman & Stage,

1992, p. 109) and a sixth belief about the usefulness of mathematics, measured by the preexisting

“Fennema-Sherman Usefulness Scale.” The six beliefs from the scale are: “I can solve time-

consuming mathematics problems,” “There are word problems that cannot be solved with

simple, step-by-step procedures,” “Understanding concepts is important in mathematics,” “Word

problems are important in mathematics,” “Effort can increase mathematical ability,” and

“Mathematics is useful in daily life” (Kloosterman & Stage, 1992, p. 115). This instrument has

been adapted and used in studies seeking links between students’ beliefs about mathematics and

mathematics achievement (e.g., Mason, 2003; Schommer-Aikins, Duell, & Hutter, 2005; Stage

& Kloosterman, 1995; Steiner, 2007) and in studies examining the effect of various interventions

on students’ beliefs (e.g., Lee, 2006; Mason & Scrivani, 2004; Taylor, 2009). Schoenfeld’s

(1989) questionnaire

contains multiple-choice questions related to attributions of success or failure (sections 1

and 2); students’ perceptions of mathematics and school practice (sections 3, 4, 5, 7, and

8); their views of school mathematics, English, and social studies (section 6); the nature

of geometric proofs, reasoning, and constructions (sections 9 and 10); motivation (section

18
 11); and personal and scholastic performance and motivation (section 12). (Schoenfeld,

1989, p. 342)

Variations on Schoenfeld’s questionnaire have been used to develop an overall picture of

students’ beliefs about mathematics (Erickson, 1993; Schoenfeld, 1989) and to examine the

effects on beliefs of an intervention engaging students in problem solving (Higgins, 1997).

Most researchers concerned with examining beliefs and conceptions across the spectrum have

used similar questionnaires (e.g., Carter & Norwood, 1997; Colby, 2007; Franks, 1990; Kaya,

2007; Malmivuori & Pehkonen, 1996; Sumpter, 2009; Verschaffel et al., 1999; Wilkins & Brand,

2004) although a few have used interviews, observation, or a mixture of techniques (e.g., Diaz-

Obando, Plasencia-Cruz, & Solano-Alvarado, 2003; Frank, 1988; Garofalo, 1989; Raymond,

1997; Telese, 1999; Wong, 2002). These broad looks at students’ and teachers’ beliefs and

conceptions have helped to provide an overall picture of the nature and content of beliefs and

conceptions and have provided the necessary information for researchers to focus more closely

on individual aspects of beliefs and conceptions.

Studies focused on conceptions of mathematics

Within each of the larger categories related to conceptions about mathematics learning

there are subcategories and specific beliefs. For example Op’ t Eynde, De Corte, and

Verschaffel (2002) subdivided beliefs about the self category into four subcategories: self-

efficacy, control, task value, and goal orientation. Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo (1996)

proposed a framework for the first category, conceptions of mathematics, which comprises four

themes, some with several dimensions (see Figure 2-2).

19
Figure 2-2. Framework of Student Conceptions of Mathematics (Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo, 1996, p.
36).

The remainder of this review will focus on the first and second themes of Grouws, Howard, &

Colangelo’s framework: the nature of mathematical knowledge and the nature of mathematical

activity.

Many researchers have focused on conceptions of the nature of mathematical knowledge

and have developed different schema for organizing their findings. Most of the work developing

organizational schema has focused on the conceptions of college students or mathematics

teachers. Ernest (1988) identified three philosophies of the nature of mathematics:

First of all, there is the instrumentalist view that mathematics is an accumulation of facts,

rules and skills to be used in the pursuance of some external end. Thus mathematics is a

20
 set of unrelated but utilitarian rules and facts. Secondly, there is the Platonist view of

mathematics as a static but unified body of certain knowledge. Mathematics is

discovered, not created. Thirdly, there is the problem solving view of mathematics as a

dynamic, continually expanding field of human creation and invention, a cultural product.

Mathematics is a process of enquiry and coming to know, not a finished product, for its

results remain open to revision. (p. 2)

Ernest viewed these philosophies hierarchically, with instrumentalist representing the lowest

level of the hierarchy. Dionne (1988 as cited in Mura, 1993) defined three similar perceptions:

traditionalist, formalist, and constructivist. Dionne, however, conceived of teachers’ perceptions

as comprised of some percentage of each of the three perceptions. Torner and Grigutsch (1994

as cited in Pehkonen, 2004) combined these two schemas and proposed the categories:

“toolbox”-aspect, systems-aspect, and process-aspect. Grigutsch and Torner (1998) used the

results of surveys of university mathematics teachers from German-speaking countries to

identify five dimensions of the teachers’ views of mathematics, which are similar to those

identified in earlier studies and then took the further step of examining how those beliefs fit

together and the ways in which teachers’ views in one dimension may be correlated to views in

other dimensions. Figure 2-3 shows how the views group into dynamic and static views of

mathematics. Positive and negative correlations between teachers’ views in the dimensions are

indicated by (+) and (-) signs.

21
Figure 2-3. Intercorrelative relations between the dimensions (Grigutsch and Torner, 1998, p. 26)

Grigutsch and Torner’s five dimensions of views of mathematics (process, application,

formalism, schema, Platonism) are related to Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo’s (1996) first two

categories (composition and structure of mathematical knowledge) while their grouping into

dynamic and static views helps to clarify the relationship of the dimensions to Grouws, Howard,

& Colangelo’s third category, status of mathematical knowledge.

Petocz et al. (2007), in examining the responses of undergraduates majoring in

mathematics or related field to the question “what is mathematics,” grouped responses into five

categories, which they organized into the nested model shown in Figure 2-4.

Figure 2-4. Relationship between conceptions. Petocz et al. (2007).

22
The innermost category, number, is a conception of mathematics as being about numbers and

calculations. The components category correlates with Torner and Grigutsch’s (1994 as cited in

Pehkonen, 2004) conception of mathematics as a “toolbox” containing “a collection of isolated

techniques” (Petocz et al., 2007, p. 446) to be used as necessary to solve problems. The

modeling and abstract conceptions are placed with the same “ring” in the figure to indicate that

an abstract view of mathematics and a view of mathematics as modeling reality are separate

categories but not ones that could nested within each other. The outer level, life, is a conception

of mathematics as “a way to understand how life works” (Petocz et al., 2007, p. 447).

Essentially the inner two levels of conceptions in this model appear analogous to Ernest’s (1988)

instrumentalist conceptions. The descriptions of the outer three conceptions seem to indicate

more of a focus on the role of mathematics than the focus on the nature of mathematical

knowledge evident in some of the earlier writers.

Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, and Prosser (1998a, 1998b) used a very similar five-

category structure in their study of the mathematical conceptions of undergraduate students.

However, their categories, while analogous to those used by Petocz, et al. (2007), are clearly

hierarchal and are sorted into two main groupings: fragmented conceptions and cohesive

conceptions. Figure 2-5 shows the categories and their groupings.

Figure 2-5 Conceptions of Mathematics (Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, & Prosser 1998a, p. 458)

23
This simple division into fragmented and cohesive conceptions is particularly useful for the

present study as Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, and Prosser’s cohesive connections is an important

part of what is referred to in this study as a conception of mathematics as sensible.

The most common approach used for determining students’ and teachers’ conceptions of

the nature of mathematics is to ask them directly about these conceptions. Researchers have

used variations on the question “What is mathematics?” in a number of different settings. Reid,

Petocz, Smith, Wood, and Dortins (2003) asked 22 “late stage” undergraduate mathematics

majors “what do you think mathematics is about?” (p. 165) followed by several other open-

ended questions. From the results of these interviews they developed a framework (see Figure 2-

4) that they used to analyze data from much a larger, international study in which students were

asked in a survey about their conceptions of mathematics (Houston et al., 2010; Petocz et al.,

2007). Franke and Carey (1997), doing research on 1st graders’ conceptions of mathematics,

adapted the question and asked “Some of the kindergartners are wondering what it will be like to

do math in first grade. What would you tell them about the kinds of things that you do in math?”

(p. 11). Mura (1993, 1995) asked mathematics professors and college-level mathematics

educators for their definition of mathematics as well as for a list of the 10 most influential books

in the development of the discipline of mathematics. Responses in this study sound a note of

caution about the usefulness of direct questions about what mathematics is. Mura found that

33% of mathematicians skipped the question and at least one, in responding the question “How

would you define mathematics?” responded “I wouldn’t” (Mura, 1995, p. 394). Mura also found

that both mathematicians and mathematics educators held a wide variety of conceptions of the

nature of mathematics. Mura notes, “mental images are often diffuse, incoherent and partly

unconscious, hence difficult to articulate. No doubt, what each participant in the present research

24
has produced offers but a small portion of his or her ideas about mathematics” (Mura, 1995, p.

396). Frid (1995), in her examination of the conceptions of mathematics of high school students,

sounded a similar note of caution. She found that students’ responses to her opening question

“what is mathematics?” responded with the expected answers about mathematics being about

“numbers, rules, and formulas” (p. 273). However, when she pushed students further, asking

questions about where mathematics came from and how it was developed, students presented a

far richer view of the nature of mathematics. Telese (1999), working with Mexican-American

high school students, had perhaps the most difficulty in asking students directly about their

definition of mathematics. After conducting interviews with students as a follow-up to a Likert-

scale type inventory, he concluded, “Generally, the students could not define mathematics” (p.

164).

To overcome the limitations of asking students and teachers directly about their

conceptions of the nature of mathematics, some researchers have developed and used multi-item

inventories designed to provide an overall picture of conceptions of mathematics. Grouws,

Howard, & Colangelo (1996), in order to examine the conceptions of mathematics of high school

students, developed the Conceptions of Mathematics Inventory based on their framework of

students’ conceptions of mathematics (shown in Figure 2-2). The inventory is a compilation of

items from pre-existing sources and new items written by the researchers. Crawford, Gordon,

Nicholas, and Prosser (1994) used a survey of five open-ended questions about mathematics,

including “Think about the maths you’ve done so far. What do you think mathematics is?” (p.

1994). The results from this survey of first-year college mathematics majors were used to

develop and test the Conceptions of Mathematics Questionnaire (Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas,

and Prosser, 1998b). This questionnaire was then used in a large-scale study of the conceptions

25
of mathematics of college students and the relationship of those conceptions to the students’

experience of learning mathematics.

A few researchers have taken approaches other than asking about the nature of

mathematics or using inventories to study conceptions of mathematics. Dionne (1988 as

reported in Mura, 1993) asked elementary school teachers to apportion points across three

different conceptions of mathematics: traditionalist, formalist, and constructivist. Wong,

Marton, Wong, and Lam (2002), as part of their multipart study of the conceptions of

mathematics of students in Grades 3–9, observed students as they engaged in solving a variety of

nonroutine mathematics problems. Presmeg (2003) used in-depth interviews about the nature of

mathematics and students’ experience of mathematics beyond school to examine the conceptions

of mathematics of high school and college students. The alternative research methods used by

these researchers add a detail and richness to the picture of the conceptions of mathematics

provided by the rest of the research.

What conceptions do students have about the nature of mathematics?

The results from studies that examine students’ conceptions of mathematics cannot help

but be disappointing to anyone concerned about students viewing mathematics as sensible.

Large-scale studies consistently find that the majority of students view mathematics as utilitarian

but comprised of essentially disconnected “numbers, rules, and fragments” (Crawford, Gordon,

Nicholas, & Prosser, 1994). Petocz et al. (2007) found that more than 50% of college students

pursuing majors in mathematics or mathematics related fields conceived of mathematics as either

merely “manipulation with numbers” (p. 445) or as a “collection of isolated techniques” (p. 446).

Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, & Prosser (1994) surveyed 300 college freshmen and found that

26
“over 75% of students conceive of mathematics as a fragmented body of knowledge” (p. 457).

These bleak percentages are reinforced by common student conceptions of mathematics found by

other researchers.

Researchers have found that students tend to view mathematics as being primarily about

computation and following rules (Frank, 1988; Garofalo, 1989; Mason, 2003; Schoenfeld, 1989;

Wong, 2002), that only the mathematics that is tested is important (Garofalo, 1989), and that

various components of mathematical knowledge are unrelated (Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, &

Prosser, 1994; Muis, 2004). Students also tend to believe that all mathematical problems are

solvable (Reusser, as cited in Mason, 2003), all mathematics problems should be quickly

solvable (Frank, 1988, Schoenfeld, 1992), that mathematics is essentially an individual pursuit

(Schoenfeld, 1992; Sumpter, 2010), that the goal of mathematics is get the correct answers

(Atallah, Bryant, & Dada, 2010; Frank, 1988; Wong, Marton, Wong, & Lam, 2002), and that

getting the correct answer is the same as understanding (Wong, 2002). Several researchers have

found that students do tend to see mathematics as useful (Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, &

Presser, 1994; Petocz et al., 2007; Wong, 2002) although Steiner (2007) found that over 40% of

college students in her study “did not believe that mathematics beyond basic mathematics was

useful to everyday life” (p. vi). Wong (2002) found that students tended to believe that

mathematics did involve thinking, receiving comments like, “Mathematics is for training logical

thinking” and “Mathematics is a thinking exercise” (pp. 222-223).

One reason why the conceptions that students have about the nature of mathematics are

important is that there is evidence that these conceptions have an effect on students’ achievement

in mathematics and the way that students study mathematics. Several studies have linked

students’ conceptions and beliefs related to mathematics, as measured by variation on the Indiana

27
Mathematical Beliefs Scales (Kloosterman and Stage, 1992), to student achievement. Stage and

Kloosterman (1995) and Steiner (2007) found that college students with certain conceptions of

mathematics and mathematics learning tended to have lower grades in mathematics courses or on

the final examination for their mathematics course. Schommer-Aikins, Duell, and Hutter (2005)

likewise found that more productive conceptions and beliefs about mathematics and mathematics

learning were positively correlated with problem-solving performance, reading scores, and

overall grade point averages for middle school students. Malmivuori and Pehkonen (1996), also

working with middle school students, identified particular factors from the conceptions inventory

that contributed to variance in achievement test scores. They found that self-confidence about

mathematics, an orientation toward effort and self-regulation, a clear self-image in mathematics,

and similar affective beliefs related to mathematics were positively correlated with achievement

scores. All of these findings linking results from the Indiana Mathematical Beliefs Scales

(Kloosterman and Stage, 1992) to student achievement tended to focus on beliefs and

conceptions related to self and learning rather than conceptions related to the nature of

mathematics. Only Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, and Prosser (1994, 1998a, 1998b) focused on

conceptions of mathematics. They found that college students who had fragmented conceptions

of mathematics were also more likely to engage in surface approaches to studying mathematics.

Given the evidence that students’ beliefs and conceptions related to mathematics

education influence important student outcomes, it is worthwhile to consider influences on the

development and change of those beliefs and conceptions. Several researchers have examined

beliefs and conceptions of different subgroups and found that there are differences in

conceptions among different segments of the population. Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo (1996)

studied the conceptions of mathematically talented students and those of average students

28
enrolled in an algebra class. They found that “Mathematically talented students consistently

viewed mathematics as a coherent system with meaningful connections between and among

concepts, principles, and skills, but the algebra students’ responses were more varied and

reflected a less connected view of mathematics” (p. 19). Wilkins and Ma (2003) studied beliefs

and conceptions of students across middle school and high school and found that conceptions of

the nature of mathematics tended to remain stable but that older students tended to have a less

positive attitude toward mathematics and be less likely to believe in its usefulness than did

younger students.

Several studies have examined the impact of classroom interventions on students’

conceptions and beliefs related mathematics education. Taylor (2009) studied the effect of a 5-

week summer course for middle school students, which “was designed to necessitate

collaborative problem-solving and emphasized both the debriefing of final answers and the

sharing and discussing of mistakes and roadblocks” (p. 107), on students’ beliefs and

conceptions. She found small but significant changes in five indicators from the Indiana

Mathematical Beliefs Scales (Kloosterman and Stage, 1992) related to effort, self-efficacy, the

importance of understanding mathematical concepts, and the usefulness and relevance of

mathematics. Mason and Scrivani (2004) examined the effect on beliefs of fifth-grade students

involved for 3 months in a “novel classroom environment where students face non-traditional

and open challenging problems, reflect on their nature and discuss the different strategies that

could be adopted to solve them” (p. 172). They found that these students had “more advanced”

beliefs about themselves as mathematics learners and about mathematics and mathematical

problem solving. Verschaffel et al. (1999) and Lee (2006) also examined effects of interventions

on student beliefs and conceptions but their findings focused on categories of beliefs not related

29
to students’ conceptions of mathematics. Only one study reported results directly related to

students’ conceptions of mathematics. This study found that high school students in classes

using a traditional mathematics textbook were more likely than students in classes using a reform

mathematics textbook to “view the structure of mathematics as a coherent system of concepts,

principles, and skills rather than as a collection of isolated pieces” and “more likely … to view

the process of doing mathematics as valuing, exploring, comprehending, and exploring concepts

and principles rather than simply implementing procedures and finding results” (Colby, 2007,

pp. 108–109). This difference was magnified when classes using the reform textbook were

taught using more reform-oriented instructional practices.

What can this study add?

Researchers have made good progress indentifying and classifying students’ and

teachers’ conceptions and beliefs related to mathematics education. However, almost all of the

research of students’ conceptions of mathematics has relied on some form of self-reporting.

Even Likert-scale surveys are a form of self-reporting (Presmeg, 2003) and require that

respondents be aware of their own conceptions and interpret the items in a way similar to that

intended by the researcher. There are, to my knowledge, no studies that seek indicators of

students’ conceptions in students’ actions. This study will offer important information and tools

by examining action-oriented indicators of students’ conceptions about mathematics.

30
 Chapter 3 Development of the Initial Framework of Indicators

The first phase of this study was to use the existing literature on students’ conceptions of

mathematics as sensible to create an initial framework for analyzing classroom data. In this

chapter I will describe the process used to produce the initial framework and introduce the list of

indicators and initial framework.

Generating indicators from the literature

The process of examining beliefs and conceptions can be challenging. Although simply

asking about beliefs seems an obvious strategy, Munby (1982) notes, “we may not be the best

people to clearly enunciate our beliefs and perspectives since some of these may lurk beyond

ready articulation” (p. 217). Munby also notes an additional difficulty with simply asking about

beliefs; beliefs are imbedded in a perspective and without context of the perspective from which

a question is asked, it is difficult to know how to answer it. On the other hand, imbedding the

question in a perspective tends to presuppose the belief desired by the person asking the question

rather than giving free rein to the beliefs of the person answering the question. Likert-scale

questionnaires, multiple interview questions, and open-response surveys are many of the ways

that researchers have sought to address the issue inherent in self-reporting of beliefs and

conceptions. However, all of these instruments are still, in a sense, self-reports and are also

subject to the same concerns about interpretation of meaning and context raised by Munby. Both

to address the concerns with self-reporting of conceptions and because conceptions have been

shown to affect student problem solving, I chose to examine students’ conceptions of

31
mathematics by looking for indicators in what students say and do while engaged in doing

mathematics.

This phase of the study began with a thorough examination of the literature on students’

and teachers’ conceptions of mathematics. To identify the relevant literature I started with

chapters from both the Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Grouws,

1992) and the Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Lester,

2007). I examined the sources cited in the chapters and the sources cited in the original works. I

also used Google Scholar to identify studies that had cited any of the sources from the handbook

chapters and examined any that were relevant to conceptions of mathematics. I then searched the

Internet for studies relating to conceptions of mathematics, beliefs about mathematics, and

mathematics as sensible. For each new source, I identified and examined the sources cited and

the works that had cited that source.

I chose, for this portion of my study, to include both studies of students’ conceptions of

mathematics and studies of teachers’ conceptions of mathematics. Part of this decision was

based on the relative scarcity of studies related to conceptions of mathematics. Another factor

was the similarity between the two types of studies. The studies often used very similar research

methods and questionnaire items. By including all of the studies, I hoped to generate the most

comprehensive list of indicators possible.

In this set of studies I did not find indicators that might be used to examine students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible in any of the literature on conceptions of mathematics or

teaching for sense-making. However, many of the studies contain questionnaire items, interview

questions, and anecdotes about students who do and do not seem to see mathematics as sensible.

There are also, in the literature, some characteristics that seem to set gifted students apart and

32
appear to be related to a conception of mathematics as sensible. In building a set of action-

oriented, observable indicators that students conceive of mathematics as sensible I built off of the

questionnaire items, interview questions, and student characteristics used in other studies.

Because, as I argued in my introduction, many of the Standards for Mathematical Practice from

the CCSS-M are related a conception of mathematics as sensible, I also used some of these

standards in the development of indicators. Table 3-1 shows the list of sources used to generate

indicators.

Source Type of Data

Brown et al., 1988 Likert-type scale items adapted from Fourth National
Assessment of Educational Progress (Dossey, Mullis,
Lindquist, & Chambers, 1988)
Carter & Norwood, 1997 Likert-type scale items
Garofalo, 1989 Characteristics of students
Grouws, Howard, & Likert-type scale items
Colangelo, 1996
Higgins, 1997 Likert-type scale items from Schoenfeld, 1989
Kaya, 2007 Likert-type scale items
Kloosterman & Stage, 1992 Likert-type scale items
Leder and Forgasz, 2002 Likert-type scale items
NGA & CCSSO, 2010 Standards for mathematical practice
Raymond, 1997 Descriptors of teachers’ beliefs
Schoenfeld, 1989 Likert-type scale items and open-ended survey items
Schommer-Aikins, Duell, & Likert-scale type items from Kloosterman & Stage,
Hutter, 2005 1992 and Fennema & Sherman, 1976

Stodolsky, 1985 Characteristics of classroom interactions

Sumpter, 2009 Likert-scale type items from Leder and Forgasz, 2002
Telese, 1999 Likert-type scale items adapted from Fourth National
Assessment of Educational Progress (Dossey, Mullis,
Lindquist, & Chambers, 1988)
Wong, Marton, Wong, Lam, Students’ statements in interviews
2002
Table 3-1 – Sources used to generate indicators.

Many of the studies identified as potential sources for indicators conceptualized students’

conceptions more broadly than as only conceptions of mathematics. The researchers often

33
examined students’ conceptions of mathematics, their conceptions of learning, beliefs about how

mathematics should be taught, and their conceptions of their own self-efficacy. Therefore, the

first stage in building the list of indicators was to identify the items in the source materials that

were related to students’ conceptions of mathematics rather than to their conceptions of other

aspects of mathematics learning such as mathematics teaching or self-efficacy with respect to

mathematics. Items such as “If a student is confused about math, the teacher should go over the

material again more slowly” (Carter & Norwood, 1997) or “I am good at mathematics” (Brown,

et al., 1988) were not included because they did not directly address students’ conceptions of

mathematics as sensible.

In order to create an initial set of indicators about students’ conceptions of mathematics

as sensible, I examined all of the questionnaire items, questions, anecdotes, and characteristics

that were related to conceptions of mathematics as sensible. I sought similarity between

statements and grouped them into similar conceptions. I then considered what student action

would demonstrate such a conception. For example, if a student were to agree with statements

like, “It doesn’t really matter if you understand a math problem if you can get the right answer”

(Schommer-Aikins, Duell, & Hutter, 2005, p. 297) he or she might seek explanation for why an

answer is correct. A student who disagrees with statements like, “Math problems can be done

correctly in only one way” (Higgins, 1997, p. 15) might demonstrate that by seeking alternative

ways to solve a problem. Altogether I generated a list of 22 indicators based on the conceptions

of mathematics as sensible found in the literature. Table 3-2 shows the indicators and a sample

of the original sources from which the indicators were adapted.

Indicator Source
Students discussing how “There are word problems that cannot be solved with
1 to solve a problem rather simple, step-by-step procedures” (Kloosterman &
than seeking the “right Stage, 1992,, p. 115).

34
 steps.” “There is always a rule to follow in solving math
problems” Telese, 1999, p. 159).
“Mathematical task (sic) should be solved with a
specific method” (Sumpter, 2009, p.6).
“There is always a rule to follow in solving
mathematics problems” (Brown et al., 1988, p.347).
Students seeking “A person who doesn’t understand why an answer to a
2 explanations for why an math problem I correct hasn’t really solved the
answer is correct or problem” (Kloosterman & Stage, 1992, p. 115).
incorrect. In math, knowing why an answer is correct is important
(Telese, 1999, p. 159).
“In addition to getting a right answer in math, it is
important to understand why the answer is correct”
(Kaya, 2007, p. 217).
“It’s not important to understand why a mathematical
procedure works as long as it gives a correct answer”
(Schommer-Aikins, Duell, & Hutter, 2005, p. 297).
“Knowing how to solve a problem is as important as
getting the solution” (Brown et al., 1988, p. 347).
Students seeking or using “When I cannot remember the exact way my teacher
3 alternative solution taught me to solve a math problem, I know some
strategies. other methods that I can try” (Kaya, 2007, p. 217).
“Math problems can be done correctly in only one way”
(Higgins, 1997, p. 15).
Math problems can be done correctly in only one way”
(Schoenfeld, 1989, p. 352).
“A mathematical problem can always be solved in
different ways” (Brown et al., 1988, p. 347).
Students expressing a “Real math problems can be solved by common sense
4 role for common sense in instead of the math rules that you learn in school”
doing mathematics. (Higgins, 1997, p. 15; Schoenfeld, 1989, p. 353).
“My own reasoning is not a safe strategy” (Sumpter,
2009, p.6).
Students being willing to “There are word problems that cannot be solved with
5 try to solve a problem for simple, step-by-step procedures” (Kloosterman &
which they have not been Stage, 1992, p. 115).
taught a procedure. “To solve math problems, you have to be taught the
right procedure or you can’t do anything” (Higgins,
1997, p. 15; Schoenfeld, 1989, p. 353).
“To try to create your own solution to a mathematical
task is impossible” (Sumpter, 2009, p. 6).
Students offering “To try to create your own solution to a mathematical
6 suggestions for how to task is impossible” (Sumpter, 2009, p.6).
solve a problem for “To solve math problems, you have to be taught the
which they have not been right procedure or you can’t do anything” (Higgins,
taught a procedure. 1997, p. 15; Schoenfeld, 1989, p. 353).

35
 - Students invoking “Memorizing steps is not that useful for learning to
7(-) memory of procedures solve word problems” Kloosterman & Stage, 1992,
for solving problems. p. 115).
“Learning math is mostly memorizing” (Telese, 1999,
p. 159).
“It is important to remember every step of a method”
(Sumpter, 2009, p.6).
- Students using poor “Learning math is mostly memorizing” (Telese, 1999,
8(-) memory as a reason why p. 159).
they cannot do a “When I cannot remember the exact way my teacher
problem. taught me to solve a math problem, I know some
other methods that I can try” (Kaya, 2007, p.217).
“If I can’t remember how to solve it (which method to
use), I can’t proceed” (Sumpter, 2009, p.6).
- Students seeking to be “When you get the wrong answer to a math problem
9(-) told whether or not an …you only find out when it’s different from the
answer is correct. book’s answer or when the teacher tells you”
(Higgins, 1997, p. 15; Schoenfeld, 1989, p. 353).
Students checking “You can from the answer decide whether you have
10 answers by examining solved the task correctly or not” (Sumpter, 2009,
reasonableness or using p.6).
an alternative strategy or “Mathematically proficient students check their
representation. answers to problems using a different method, and
they continually ask themselves, ‘Does this make
sense?’” (CCSI, p.6)
Students inventing their “Make up my own math problems to solve” (Telese,
11 own mathematics 1999, p. 159).
problems to solve.
Students seeking “A lot of things in math must simply be accepted as try
12 explanations for things in and remembered: there really isn’t any explanation
mathematics rather than for them” (Carter & Norwood, 1997, p. 63).
simply accepting them as
truths to be remembered.
Students justifying “Justifying the mathematical statements a person
13 mathematical statements. makes is an extremely important part of
mathematics” (Brown et al., 1988, p.347).
“Mathematically proficient students … justify their
conclusions” (CCSI, p. 6).
Students seeking “Mathematics is made up of unrelated topics” (Brown
14 connections between et al., 1988, p. 347).
mathematical topics. “Mathematics? is an unrelated collection of facts, rules,
and skills” (Raymond, 1997, p. 557).
“Mathematical knowledge consists mainly of ideas and
concepts and the connections between them”
(Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo, 1996, p. 38).
Students adapting “Finding solutions to one type of mathematics problem

36
15 solution methods for one cannot help you solve other types of problems
type of problem to help (Grouws, Howard, & Colangelo, 1996, p. 38).
them solve another.
Students recognize “Mathematical tasks often look similar” (Sumpter,
16 similarity between 2009, p.7).
mathematics problems. “Mathematically proficient students… consider
analogous problems” (CCSI, p. 6).
Students recognizing that Garofalo, 1989
17 size and quantity of
numbers is unrelated to
problem difficulty.
Students using multiple “Diagrams can help thinking” (Wong, Marton, Wong,
18 representations in Lam, 2002, p. 32).
problem solving.
Students explaining “Students explain how to solve math problems”
19 answers. (Telese, 1999, p. 159).
Students engaging in 2- Stodolsky, 1985
20 way conversations about
mathematics (versus
information flowing from
expert to novice).
Students strategizing “Mathematically proficient students start by explaining
21 about solution methods to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking
for entry points to its solution. They analyze givens,
constraints, relationships, and goals. They make
conjectures about the form and meaning of the
solution and plan a solution pathway rather than
simply jumping into a solution attempt” (CCSI, p. 6).
Students “Mathematically proficient students make sense of
22 decontextualizing and quantities and their relationships in problem
recontextulizing as they situations. They bring two complementary abilities to
solve problems bear on problems involving quantitative
relationships: the ability to decontextualize—to
abstract a given situation and represent it
symbolically and manipulate the representing
symbols as if they have a life of their own, without
necessarily attending to their referents—and the
ability to contextualize, to pause as needed during
the manipulation process in order to probe into the
referents for the symbols involved” (CCSI, p. 6).
Table 3-2 – Representative sources for indicators

37
 Whereas many of the questionnaire items and anecdotes tend to focus on indicators that

students do not see mathematics as sensible, I tried to rewrite them as positive indicators. There

are three items, marked in Table 3-3 by a (-), that are negative indicators. These were indicators

that I had difficulty rewording as a positive indicator but were so prominent in the literature that

I decided that they needed to be included in the framework.

Indicator

1 Students discussing how to solve a problem rather than seeking the “right steps.”

2 Students seeking explanations for why an answer is correct or incorrect.

3 Students seeking or using alternative solution strategies.

4 Students expressing a role for common sense in doing mathematics.

Students being willing to try to solve a problem for which they have not been taught a
5 procedure.
Students offering suggestions for how to solve a problem for which they have not been
6 taught a procedure.

7(-) - Students invoking memory of procedures for solving problems.

8(-) - Students using poor memory as a reason why they cannot do a problem

9(-) - Students seeking to be told whether or not an answer is correct.

Students checking answers by examining reasonableness or using an alternative
10 strategy or representation.

11 Students inventing their own mathematics problems to solve.

Students seeking explanations for things in mathematics rather than simply accepting
12 them as truths to be remembered.

13 Students justifying mathematical statements.

14 Students seeking connections between mathematical topics.

Students adapting solution methods for one type of problem to help them solve
15 another.

16 Students recognize similarity between mathematics problems.

38
 Students recognizing that size and quantity of numbers is unrelated to problem
17 difficulty.

18 Students using multiple representations in problem solving.

19 Students explaining answers.

Students engaging in 2-way conversations about mathematics (versus information
20 flowing from expert to novice).

21 Students strategizing about solution methods

22 Students decontextualizing and recontextulizing as they solve problems

Table 3-3. List of indicators

In developing the list of indicators I generally did not include ideas that appeared in only

one source. Table 3-4 shows the sources for each indicator. There were two indicators that were

included despite being mentioned in only one source. The indicator, “Students recognizing that

size and quantity of numbers is unrelated to problem difficulty” was included because, although

only one study actually discussed this as a characteristic of students’ engagement with problem

solving, several other researchers cited this single study and treated this characteristic as an

important characteristic. The indicator, “Students inventing their own mathematics problems to

solve” was initially dropped from the list because it came from a single source. It was added

back in because it was an action that was observed during the pilot study.

Indicator # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
Brown et al., x x x x x x x
1988
Carter & x x x
Norwood,
1997
Crawford, x x
Gordon,
Nicholas, &
Prosser,
1998b

Garofalo, x x
1985

39
Grouws, x x x x x x
Howard, &
Colangelo,
et al., 1996
Higgins, x x x x x x x x
1997
Kaya, 2007 x x
Kloosterman x x x x x
& Stage,
1992
Leder and x x
Forgasz,
2002
NGA & x x x x x x
CCSSO,
2010
Raymond, x x x x x
1997
Schoenfeld, x x x x x x x x x x
1989
Schommer- x x x x
Aikins,
Duell, &
Hutter, 2005
Stodolsky, x x
1985
Sumpter, x x x x x x x x x x
2009
Telese, 1999 x x x x x
Wong, x x x x
Marton,
Wong, Lam,
2002
Table 3-4 – Sources of Indicators

Initial testing of the list of indicators

After compiling the list of indicators from the literature, I used the list of indicators that

students conceived of mathematics as sensible to code five classroom videos (each about 45

minutes long). Three of the videos were from an Integrated Mathematics II class taught by Mr.

Wingate (a pseudonym), the teacher described in this study. One video was a TIMMS video

from a U.S. classroom. The fifth video was of a classroom at a local high school taught by Mr.

A, an experienced mathematics teacher. The purpose of this pilot study was to test whether the

40
indicators generated from the literature could be identified in classroom recordings and whether

there were indicators of conceptions of mathematics as sensible that seemed to be missing from

the list.

The list of indicators proved helpful for identifying incidents and most of the incidents

were relatively easy to classify using the indicators. There are, however, three important

limitations to the list of indicators. The first limitation is that the list of indicators is designed to

provide evidence that students conceive of mathematics as sensible not to identify when students

do not have such a conception. In the pilot data, there were some classes in which there were

many indicators that students conceived of mathematics as sensible. There were two classes, the

one from the TIMMS videos and the class taught by Mr. A, in which there were very few

indicators to code. Because of the design of the indicators we can draw some conclusions about

the conceptions of students in the classes in which there were indicators, but it would be a

mistake to assume that, because there were no indicators to the contrary, that students in the

other classes did not conceive of mathematics as sensible. With the exception of the three

negative indicators in the list of indicators all of the indicators identify when such a conception is

likely to be present, not when it might be absent. Drawing conclusions about the lack of

students’ conception that mathematics makes sense would require a different list of indicators.

The second limitation of the list of indicators is a lack of flexibility in coding incidents.

In the pilot data there were several incidents that seemed to provide evidence that students

conceived of mathematics as sensible but that did not match any of the indicators. For example,

in one incident, the teacher is handing out a worksheet and commenting on some of the problems

on the sheet. A student interrupts with a mathematical joke.

T: One, two, three, four – easy. Five … five, you’ll enjoy.

41
 S: One, two, seven, eight, nine.

T: Is that your phone number?

S: No, it’s how I count.

In this incident it appears that the student chooses to take some of the teachers’ words out

of context and interpret the teacher’s “One, two, three, four, … five … five as a nonstandard

counting sequence. He teases the teacher by presenting his own nonstandard sequence. This

joke, relying as it does on the basic sequential structure of the number system would seem to

indicate that the student conceived of mathematics as sensible enough that he noticed when the

teacher’s statement could reinterpreted as violating that structure and used humor to mirror the

violation. The lack of any way to code this incident using the existing list of indicators pointed

to the need for either more indicators or another way to code the data.

A third limitation of the list of indicators became evident when trying to code transcripts

from Mr. Wingate’s classroom. In that classroom there were often so many indicators that

working with a randomly organized list of 22 items was very cumbersome. Because of this

difficulty, I sought a way to organize the list of indicators. I extracted five themes which could

be phrased as and used as broadly defined indicators. These themes became the five guiding

statements for the framework of indicators.

• Students who conceive of mathematics as sensible expect that things in mathematics can

be explained so they may seek or provide explanations.

• Students who conceive of mathematics as sensible expect connections so they may seek

or express connections.

• Students who conceive of mathematics as sensible believe that you can reason through

problems so they may strategize about how to do mathematics.

42
 • Students who conceive of mathematics as sensible believe that mathematics is

authoritative and may assume mathematical authority.

• Students who conceive of mathematics as sensible may state that something in

mathematics makes sense or may talk about common sense playing a role in doing

mathematics.

Organizing the list of indicators into categories solved both the problem of dealing with

22 separate items and the need for a more flexible way to identify indicators. The indicators

were arranged into an initial framework around five major categories: strategizing, expecting

connections, expecting explanations, assuming authority, and stating (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1 – Initial Framework

43
 This initial framework was then used to code the classroom data, as described in Chapter

4. The general categories made it easy to find specific indicators for coding. The general

categories also provided the flexibility to code incidents using just the category rather than

naming a specific indicator. For example, the student joke cited earlier could be coded as seeing

mathematical connections even though it did not match any specific indicator in the category.

This initial framework made it much easier to identify incidents in which students’ actions

indicated that they saw mathematics as sensible and it also provided the flexibility to code some

critical incidents in the classroom that might otherwise have been missed because they did not

match a specific indicator.

Having identified categories for use in the framework, I now examine some of the

literature related to the four major categories: explaining, strategizing, making connections, and

assuming authority. After looking at literature related to these four categories, I discuss several

other observation frameworks and their connection with my initial framework.

Literature in the framework categories

Doing a focused review of the literature in mathematics education related to the

categories of explaining, strategizing, and making connections is made almost impossible by the

fact that the categories are so broad and so central to what it means to do mathematics that they

are, in some way, imbedded in virtually every policy and standards document. The NCTM

Process Standards (NCTM, 2000) explicitly address strategizing, explaining, and making

connections within mathematics. The CCSS-M Standards for Mathematical Practice (NGA &

CCSSO, 2010), while less explicit, also embed these categories throughout. For example

“construct viable arguments” (p.6) is an important indicator from the explaining category while

44
“explain correspondences between equations, verbal descriptions, tables, and graphs” (p. 6) is an

important part of making connections. Likewise, Adding It Up (NRC, 2001) has references to

indicators in the categories of strategizing, explaining, and seeking connections embedded in

multiple different strands of mathematical proficiency. For example, explaining why is

described as a central part of adaptive reasoning, ““One manifestation of adaptive reasoning is

the ability to justify one’s work” (p. 130) and making connections is central to the strand of

conceptual understanding, “facts and methods learned with understanding are connected” (p.

118). The central role the actions signified by these categories within the policy and standards

literature means that these categories are also, in some way, related to most studies about the

learning of mathematics. The challenge is that most studies accept the importance of these

categories and move directly to discussion of how to engender such behaviors in students. There

is seldom much discussion about why the behavior is important or what the action might indicate

about students’ conceptions of mathematics.

Explaining

Much of the literature related to students explaining in mathematics focuses on

explaining why. There is broad agreement that justification is a central part of mathematics and

shoudl be a central part of school mathematics (Zaslavsky, Nickerson, Stylianides, Kidron, &

Winicki, 2012). There has been substantial research on the ways in which students do (or do

not) engage in justifying and how teachers might engage students in justifying. While some the

literature focuses quite narrowly on mathematical proof, some researchers have worked with a

more expanded vision of explaining why. For example, Harel and Sowder (1998) described

several different “proof schemes” as a way to discuss types of justifications. Similarly,

45
Beckmann (2002) makes a distinction between the goals, methods, and rigor of “explaining

why” and “proving.” These distinctions help to make it clear that explaining why may include

a far broader range of student actions than just engagement in formal mathematical proving.

In addition to a discussion of explaining why they believe that something is true,

there is also literature about the importance of students explaining how they solved mathematical

problems. Beckmann (2002) states, “Certainly, making sense of mathematics and engaging in

mathematical reasoning are intimately connected to explaining mathematics.” The literature on

classroom discourse and student activity in reform mathematics classrooms is rich in descriptions

of the ways in which students engage in this type of behavior and ways in which teachers can

help facilitate this activity (e.g. Boaler, 2008; Baxter & Williams, 2010; Lampert, 2001; Sherin,

2002; Stein, Smith, Henningsen, & Silver, E., 2000). There are several researchers who make a

clear distinction between explaining how and explaining why and use both categories in

describing their work (e.g. Beckmann, 2002; Inagaki, Hatano, & Morita, 1998; Kinach, 2002)

Literature on both explaining how and explaining why in mathematics classrooms provides

descriptions of what such discussion might look like, testifies to its importance in mathematics

learning, and provides valuable insights into how teachers might encourage it in their

classrooms.

Strategizing

Much of the current literature about strategizing in mathematics is contained in

studies of constructs such as adaptive expertise (Hatano & Oura, 2003) and strategy adaptivity

(Verschaffel, Luwel, Torbeyns, & Van Dooren, 2009) which focus on flexibility and adaptability

in the use of strategies. Despite the emphasis on the importance of strategizing and adaptive

46
reasoning in mathematics education, there is little research focused on this student behavior. As

with literature on explaining there are examples and suggested instructional practices for

strategizing embedded in much of the literature on reform teaching practices. However, in 2009

Verschaffel, Luwel, Torbeyns, & Van Dooren commented that, “...there is a basic belief in the

feasibility and value of striving for strategy flexibility/adaptivity. However, this basic belief, as

well as some accompanying presuppositions about when and for whom and how to strive for it,

have not yet been subjected to much systematic and scrutinized theoretical reflection or

empirical research” (p. 345) and there appears to have been little progress made in the

intervening years.

Making Connections

There is strong agreement that connections within mathematics are a critical part of what

it means to know and do mathematics (Burton, 1999). The development of conceptual

understanding in mathematics has been widely studied and written about and most of this work

focuses on making connections within mathematics and between different mathematical

representations. Studies in this area suggest many instructional practices to help students

develop connections within mathematics including the use of rich mathematical tasks (e.g.

Ayres, Sawyer, & Dinham, 2004; Boaler, 1998; Stein, Grover, & Henningsen, 1996; Stigler &

Hiebert, 2009), engagement of students in classroom discussion about mathematics (e.g. Boaler,

1998; Cobb et al., 1991; Cobb, Wood & Yackel, 1993; Hiebert & Wearne, 1993; Pape, Bell,

Yetkin, 2003; Stein & Lane, 1996), and explicitly focusing students’ attention on concepts and

connections (e.g. Anthony & Walshaw, 2009; Corcoran & Silander, 2009; Hiebert & Grouws,

2007; Hodara, 2011; McNaught & Grouws, 2007).

47
 In addition to an almost universal recognition of the importance of students making

connections within mathematics, there is wide agreement that students also need to see and make

connections between mathematics and other contexts. The CCSS-M Standards for

Mathematical Practice (NGA & CCSSO, 2010) devote an entire practice standard to using

mathematics for modelling and most literature on mathematical sense-making includes seeing

mathematics as relevant and useful in real life and in other academic contexts as an important

component of sense-making (e.g. Hirsch, Coxford, Fey, & Schoen, 1995; Leinwand, 2000;

Schoenfeld, 1992). Despite the agreement of the centrality of make connections in doing

mathematics there is little attention in the literature to the relationship between students learning

to make connections and students’ conceptions of the nature of mathematics.

Assuming Authority:

Mathematical authority is a construct generally seen as an important dimension of the

interactions in a mathematics classroom. It has been conceptualized somewhat differently by

different authors. Stein, Engel, Hughes, Smith (2008) conceptualize student authority as a

classroom norm stating that, “The idea behind student authority is that learning environments

should be designed so that students are “authorized” to solve mathematical problems for

themselves, are publicly credited as the “authors” of their ideas, and develop into local

“authorities” in the discipline” (p. 332). Wilson & Lloyd (2000) conceptualize it as a more

individual concept, basing their work on an understanding of authority which stresses “the

central role of individuals developing an inner voice, one in which authority is seen as an internal

rather than an external factor” (p. 151). Although slightly different in focus, the various

48
conceptualizations of mathematical authority all tend towards a more democratic view of the

locus of authority than the traditional model of teacher as sole authority figure.

In the literature on mathematical authority there are two assumptions about where

mathematical authority properly resides. Some authors discuss authority as resting upon

community-established standards (e.g. Brodie, 2012; Davis, 1997). Others see authority as

residing more in the discipline of mathematics and mathematical reasoning. This view is

exemplified in Adding It Up (NRC, 2000) which describes one advantage of adaptive reasoning

as, “Students who disagree about a mathematical answer need not rely on checking with the

teacher, collecting opinions from their classmates, or gathering data from outside the classroom.

In principle, they need only check that their reasoning is valid” (p. 129). Schoenfeld (1994)

strives to reconcile these two conceptions of mathematical authority. He states, “One might say

that the ultimate authority is the mathematics itself…Nonetheless, mathematical authority is, in

practice, exercised by human hands and minds” (p. 61). Whether mathematical authority is seen

as more focused on community or individual or whether that authority resides in the mathematics

or is embodied in community norms, there is broad agreement in the mathematics education

community that the concept of mathematical authority is critical in mathematics education.

The four major categories of the initial framework, strategizing, seeking connections,

explaining, and seeking authority are all behaviors that are widely accepted as central to students

engaging in mathematics is a sense-making way. There has been some progress identifying

instructional practices which may be useful for encouraging these actions in students. What is

still needed is a better understanding of how these particular actions might fit together and how

they are related to students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible.

49
 Other Observation Frameworks:

There a number of frameworks in the literature designed for coding classroom

observations. In this section I will discuss two observation protocols and their relation to my

initial framework. The Reform Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP, Piburn & Sawada, 2000)

was chosen because of its extensive use in mathematics education research. The Classroom Visit

Protocol was chosen because it is the most recently published such framework available.

The RTOP (Piburn & Sawada, 2000), as the name suggests, focuses on reform practices

in mathematics classrooms and has been widely used by educational researchers. Although my

study was not designed to focus on reform practices and the curriculum, and structure of the

classroom in this study are quite traditional in nature, the main categories within the initial

framework (strategizing, explaining, seeking connections, and assuming authority) are ones that

are often associated with reform mathematics instruction. The RTOP contains several items

closely resembling indicators from my initial framework. For example, one of the indicators

from my initial framework is “Students using multiple representations in problem solving” and

an item from the RTOP is “Students used a variety of means (models, drawings, graphs, concrete

materials, manipulatives,etc.) to represent phenomena” (p. 16). Despite the similarity of several

items in the two instruments, they were designed to serve very different purposes. The RTOP

was designed to observe teaching in classrooms, focusing particularly of reform teaching. By

contrast, my framework was designed to observe student behaviors in a mathematics classroom

and was not intended to focus on a particular type of instruction. Because of these differences

my initial framework has far more items focused on student behaviors. All 22 indicators in my

50
initial framework focus on students’ actions as opposed to 5 or 6 out of the 25 items in the

RTOP. The RTOP also contains many items not included in my initial framework because the

items focus on other aspects of the classroom such as classroom norms and teacher actions.

The Classroom Visit Protocol (CVP, Grouws et al., 2013) was developed to “document

the use of textbook materials and classroom activities (p. 430). Of the three parts in the CVP, the

one most closely related to my initial framework is the Classroom Learning Environment

instrument. This instrument contained items relating to strategizing, making connections, and

sharing of mathematical authority. However, the items in the CVP are focused on opportunities

provided for students rather than on the actions of the students. The CVP is a good tool for

examining the instruction and curriculum use in the classroom, including instruction relating to

some of the categories in my initial framework, but does not provide a way to examine the ways

in which students engage in doing mathematics.

51
 Chapter 4 Research Methods for Phase 2

The major focus of the next portion of the study is to use the framework in a classroom

setting to identify and document action-oriented indicators of student conceptions of

mathematics as sensible. The goal is to test the usefulness of the framework for creating the type

of “thick description” envisioned by Ponterotto (2006), both “describing and interpreting”

students’ behavior in this classroom context. This use of the framework provides an opportunity

to test and improve the framework through use of classroom data. This qualitative study

generates a theory about students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible that is grounded in

both the literature and classroom data.

In this chapter I will first describe the classroom setting and study participants. I will

describe the data that was collected and the process used in analyzing the data. I will finish with

a discussion about the trustworthiness of the data and the analysis process.

Selecting the setting

This study is an instance of a study being designed around a case of intrinsic interest

(Creswell, 2007). For five years I had the opportunity to teach down the hall from one particular

teacher’s classroom in which students seemed to share a characteristic that is all too uncommon

in many high school students—these students seemed to expect mathematics to make sense.

That is, they expected that there are reasons for rules and procedures (even if they did not

understand those reasons yet), they approached unfamiliar problems as if there was a good

chance that reasoning from what they already knew would be an effective solution strategy, and

they expected mathematical topics to be connected to one another. Although I had encountered

52
such a view of mathematics in students before, it was striking that this view seemed to

characterize almost all of my students who had previously been a part of this classroom, even

students with a history of low achievement in mathematics. Because of this unique

characteristic, I purposely selected this classroom as a setting to study because I wanted to know

more about the students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible and I had reason to believe that,

in this class, there would be evidence of such a conception.

The setting

The classroom that I studied is a mathematics classroom in a combined middle school

and high school in central New Hampshire with slightly less than 500 students in grades 7–12,

all from the same town. The community is more than 98% white with a median household

income more than 25% above the state average. Almost 50% of the adult town residents have

earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. The school is overcrowded but well-funded and prides

itself on employing top quality teachers. Student scores, district-wide, on state-wide testing are

consistently above the state average for all subjects tested. The school runs on an alternating

block schedule in which classes meet every other day for 90 minutes at a time.

Until the school year during which the observations for this study took place, the high

school mathematics sequence consisted of Integrated Mathematics 1, Integrated Mathematics 2,

Integrated Mathematics 3 or Advanced Algebra, Pre-calculus, AP Calculus 1 (AB), and AP

Calculus 2 (BC). For Integrated Mathematics 1 and Integrated Mathematics 2 there were

“honors” sections, “regular” sections, and “supported” sections with additional special education

support. The school was, during the academic year in which observations for this study took

place, in the process of transitioning to a more traditional Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2

53
sequence and was offering Algebra 1 for the first time, also with regular and honors sections, and

with a supported section called Algebra 1A in which students studied the first half of Algebra 1

one year and the second half the following year.

Supported sections of mathematics courses are generally small and are cotaught by a

mathematics teacher and a special education teacher. Many of the students in these sections have

been identified as having substantial learning disabilities and have Individual Educational Plans

(IEPs) involving mathematics. In the Integrated Mathematics 2 course, the textbook and course

competencies are the same as for both the regular and honors sections of the course. For the

Algebra 1A there is more variation.

Several years ago, the State of New Hampshire began requiring that credits for high

school courses be given based on demonstrated student competencies in course material rather

than on Carnegie units. Each school district was charged with determining competencies for

each course and determining how these would be measured. In the mathematics department at

this high school, the department determined a number of competencies for each course. The

teacher involved in this study uses short pencil – and – paper tests to determine each student’s

achievement of each competency. Students may retake tests as needed until they have

demonstrated mastery of all of the competencies for the course.

Participants

Students involved in this study were enrolled in a supported section of Algebra 1A during

the entire 2011-2012 academic year. All 18 students enrolled in the class agreed to participate in

the video portion of the study. Thirteen agreed to be interviewed. Placement in the class is by

permission only and is limited to students who have experienced difficulties with mathematics in

54
the past or who have a documented learning disability related to mathematics. Most of the

students are freshmen and were enrolled in a supported Pre-Algebra class during the previous

school year. Many of them experience difficulties in other subject areas as well and are more

likely than the school population as a whole to face disciplinary action for breaking school rules.

The teacher involved in this study, Mr. Wingate, has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics

and approximately 35 years of experience teaching high school. He has been teaching supported

sections of mathematics classes for more than 10 years. He also teaches the school’s AP

Calculus classes and a class in desktop publishing.

During the spring observation period there was also a student intern in the classroom.

She was an undergraduate students in an education program at a nearby university engaged in an

early field experience. Her primary roles were to observe and to assist individual students or

small groups engaged in independent work. Because the spring observations took place near the

end of her internship she also led class discussion of warm-up problems on several occasions.

Throughout this document study participants will be referred to using pseudonyms.

Daily pattern in the classroom

Although there were some days in which special mathematical activities changed the

pattern, most days in this classroom are very similar. When students arrive in the classroom

there are four or five warm-up problems on the board. These warm-up problems are not the

quick, straightforward review exercises usually associated with warm-ups. They generally cover

a broad range of topics that the students have already seen. One day the warm-ups required

students to find the area of an unusually shaped region, the area and perimeter of a rectangle with

side lengths containing variables, and slopes of several lines. Another day the students were

55
asked to find the area of a concave hexagon, find the value of f(3) and f(10) for the function

f(x) = x2, solve a linear equation, and find the next values in the sequence 1,1,2,3,_,_. For these

students, most of these problems were familiar but far from trivial. Students usually worked on

the warm-up problems for 10 to 15 minutes, sometimes with an interruption for a whole-class

discussion of strategy if students seemed to have difficulty knowing how to begin a problem.

Once students had finished the warm-ups and handed them in to the teacher, the teacher would a

lead a discussion about the warm-up problems and their solutions. The discussion focused

around students explaining their solutions to the class but the teacher also often extended the

discussion of the problems. Going over warm-up problems often took 30 minutes or more. The

45 minutes or more often spent on warm-up problems carried much of the content of the course.

After the warm-up problems there was generally 15 to 20 minutes in which the teacher discussed

new material or reviewed material that students still needed to work on. This was usually

followed by work time in which students worked on their own or with other students on practice

problems from a worksheet.

Data collected

The corpus of data for this study was collected in a single class over the course of the

2011-2012 academic year. The primary data is a set of video and audio recordings of the

classroom (Yin, 2011). These record are supplemented by field notes (Hays & Singh, 2011), focus

group style interviews (Morgan & Spanish, 1984), and classroom artifacts (Delamont, 2002).

56
Preexisting data

The teacher in this study, Mr. Wingate, regularly video records his lessons for his own

purposes. He also regularly collects such classroom artifacts as worksheets, quizzes, and tests.

He has video recordings and classroom artifacts for the supported Algebra 1A class for

September and October of 2011 that I am able to access. The video camera is placed at the back

of the classroom somewhat above the students’ heads and focused on the center of the

whiteboard as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. What the video shows.

This position captures the teacher presenting the lesson, most of the whole-class

discussion, and some of the student to student discussion. The primary consideration for the

positioning of the camera was to create the least possible disturbance to the class. Because of the

location above students’ heads the audio of the classroom discussion was excellent. However,

the camera placement did not provide a complete record of what was written on the board or of

students’ and teacher’s actions when they were not standing in the middle of the classroom.

Sometimes students sitting near the camera turned the camera to capture these events but this

57
was not the norm. Although this stationary placement limited some of the available data it also

provided “blind spots” in the room in which students who did not mind having their voices

recorded but preferred not to be in the video could still present solutions and information to the

class. Pre-existing data to be used in this study consists of video recordings and related

classroom artifacts for five consecutive 90-minute class periods beginning with the third class

period of the year. The participating teacher and I chose to begin with the third class period of

the year rather than the first day of school because the first several classes of the school year

were not full-length class periods and were devoted primarily to dealing with administrative

details rather than mathematics instruction.

Data collected during spring observation

During the late spring I observed five consecutive 90-minute classes and collected video

recordings, audio recordings, classroom artifacts, and field notes for each of these observations.

The participating teacher and I choose the timing of these lessons to be close to the end of the

academic year while avoiding the school’s spring break, the state-wide testing, school-wide

testing, and review for final exams.

Video recordings

The video recordings collected during the spring observation are similar to the pre-

existing videos described previously.

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Audio recordings

The audio recordings were collected using five individual recorders placed on student

tables throughout the classroom. They recorded the conversations between students as they

worked on mathematics problems and the discussion between the teacher and individual students

or small groups of students. An additional audio recorder recorded conversations between the

teacher and students from a wireless lapel microphone worn by the teacher.

Classroom artifacts

I collected copies of worksheets, quizzes, tests, and student handbooks. I took

photographs of the classroom set-up and obtained other artifacts related to the class such as

charts of course competencies, class notes taken by the special education teacher, and lesson

plans.

Field notes

Field notes consisted of descriptions of each class as it was conducted. I gave special

attention in the notes to comments, gestures, and actions that may not be captured by the video or

audio recordings and work on the white board that was unlikely to be captured by the video. I

used the field notes to record observer comments and initial impressions to be revisited later

during data analysis.

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Interview data

Group interviews/focus groups with students took place during the same time period as

the spring classroom observations or on the last day of classes before final exams. I interviewed

13 of the 18 students in the Algebra 1A class. There were five group interviews with two to

three students in each group. One of the students, who tended to have difficulty communicating

and interacting with other students, was grouped with the instructional assistant with whom he

usually worked rather than with other students. The interviews were structured around a card

placement activity (Coxon, 1999). Students were given index cards with statements about the

nature of mathematics. They were asked to discuss the statements and make a group decision

about where to place each card along a continuum from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

Figure 4-2 shows the cards. . (The cards provided to students did not contain the citations

shown on the cards below.)

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Figure 4-2. Conceptions cards for student interviews.

Group interviews were 15 to 25 minutes long. A video recording was made of the interviews

with the camera focused on the card placement. In addition, two audio recordings of each

interview were made to provide a back-up data source.

I chose to use an interview task as a way to triangulate the data from the classroom

observations. Guion, Diehl, & McDonald (2011) identify such “methodological triangulation” as

one of 5 types of triangulation commonly used by qualitative researchers “to check and establish

validity in their studies” (p. 1). I chose to work with groups of students rather than conduct one on one

interviews because I expected the groups to be “useful in accessing the ‘hard to reach’ and the potentially

recalcitrant” (Barbour, 2007, p. 29). While my groups lacked the minimum of 4 members often

considered necessary to qualify as a focus group (Krueger & Casey, 2009) the overall purpose of using a

group was similar. My goal was to provide focus for the discussion and then listen in to the conversations

of the students. I chose the card sorting activity as a tool to stimulate discussion, expecting that the need

to reach a group decision about card placement would stimulate discussion about the meaning and

importance of the statements for the participants. A possible limitation to this type of interview is results

and discussion can easily be influenced by dominant individuals (Krueger & Casey, 2009). I tried to limit

61
this issue by ensuring that all students in the group provided input on decisions and having a sufficient

number of groups so that there could be a range of opinions across groups as well as within groups.

Analysis of classroom data

The primary data from the classroom were the video recordings of two weeks of classes

in September and 2 weeks of classes during April and May of the same academic year. A total of

ten 90-minute classes were analyzed. Field notes and classroom artifacts were used, as

necessary, to clarify what was seen and heard in the video recordings. The video recordings were

analyzed using Studiocode software to identify and code indicators that students saw

mathematics as sensible (see Figure 4-3). This software permits a user to identify and label

segments of video as it is watched so, as I viewed the video I first tagged any indicators with the

labels from the major categories and then went back to add labels for specific indicators. Using

Studiocode I could then adjust the beginning and ending points of video clips, code additional

indicators in future passes through the video, and sort video clips by indicator or category. Use

of this type of software eliminated some of the cumbersome and time-consuming tasks of video

editing (Rich & Hannafin, 2009) making it more practical to analyze a larger set of data and

allowing for easy access to any coded video clip for further analysis (Jacobs, Towanaka, &

Stigler, 1999). In addition, coding directly from the video rather than from a transcript allowed

me to consider a greater range of communication with such nuances as gestures, facial

expressions, and tonal inflections all contributing to a better understanding of the classroom

communication. A serious limitation to this type of coding, however, is that it permits only

limited opportunity for flexibility in coding since a coding framework must be established in

advance. This type of analysis would not be well suited to open coding of data. In this study the

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limitations were addressed by both the initial, literature-based set of indicators and the use of the

more general categories of the initial framework when specific indicators did not closely match

the data.

Figure 4-3 Studiocode coding scheme.

Each video was viewed at least twice, stopping to insert a code whenever an indicator

appeared. Incidents were coded with both the specific indicator (shown in the small outer

rectangles in Figure 4-3) and with the larger categories (shown in the larger rectangles in figure

4-3). The 14 incidents that reflected larger categories but did not fit individual indicators were

coded with only the categories. Incidents that exemplified more than one indicator were

assigned multiple codes. Altogether, there were 86 coded incidents in the Fall data and 132 in

the Spring data.

Once the incidents were identified and coded, they were compiled into tables that

described the details of the incident. The tables included the time stamps from the video, the

coding of the category and the specific indicator, the context in which the incident occurred, a

63
description of the role of prompting in the incident, and a description of the incident (see Table

4-1 for an example).

110901a # category indicator context prompt Event

110901a 1 strategize Discuss Warm- Teacher is at Student suggests, “so wouldn’t you
13:47:53 how ups with board have to find the, like take the
14:14:37 neighbors correcting triangle and find the perimeter of
issue of one just the square and then like … er, I
student, this mean the area” as a strategy for
student raises finding the area of the figure
hand and
volunteers the
strategy

Table 4-1 – Sample incident detail

After coding the video for each class, the audio recordings from the spring observations

were reviewed. There were no incidents captured on audio recordings that had not already been

coded from the video recordings. However, there were several cases in which the audio

recording provided more detail about an incident and those details were added to the descriptions

of incidents in the tables.

After all video was coded, several types of summaries and compilations were created.

Compilations of video clips were created: one video for each class period containing all coded

incidents and a video for each category containing all the incidents with like coding. These

video compilations provided easy access to individual incidents. They, used in conjunction with

the incident detail tables, were used to look for patterns across incidents coded with the same

indicator or the same category.

Coding timelines visually displaying both the frequency and duration of incidents with

different codes were created for each class period and for the cumulative data for spring and fall.

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These timelines were used to look for patterns in when incidents occurred during class periods,

the relative length of episodes for different codes, and the coding categories that tended to occur

together. The combined seasonal timelines (see Figure 4-4) were used to look for changes in the

patterns of frequency, duration, and type of coding between the beginning and the end of the

academic year.

Figure 4-4 – Comparison of Fall and Spring Combined Timelines. The top (yellow) stripe represents
explaining. The second (blue stripe) is strategizing. The third (red) stripe is authority. The bottom
(green) stripe is connections.

Analysis of student interviews

The card sorting activity from the student interviews provided both data about how

students actually placed the conceptions cards along the strongly agree/strongly disagree

continuum and verbal comments from students about the statements. Each group’s level of

agreement with a statement was evaluated by assigning the placements on the continuum a value

from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree). In cases in which groups had disagreed and

split their placement of the card, the placement values were averaged. This system allowed for

comparison of placements between groups and a way to examine the average and variation of the

class’s ranking of particular statements. In order to analyze the comments made by students

during the interviews, verbatim transcripts of the interviews were created. Representative

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comments, along with numerical data on group agreement with statements, were then compiled

into a table to allow for easy comparison of comments across groups and across statements. The

conceptions statements were mapped to the main categories in the framework and students’

comments related to particular categories of conceptions of mathematics as sensible were linked

with the classroom indicators for those same categories. Together these data points were used to

look for themes in students’ conceptions of mathematics. In a number of cases students’

interpretations of the conceptions statements or comments made while discussing a particular

statement were related to a category in the framework other than that intended by the

conceptions statement. In those cases, the students’ statements were included in analysis of the

appropriate category.

Trustworthiness

One important check on the trustworthiness of any qualitative study is triangulation of

data sources. To provide triangulation for the first phase of the study, I had at least two sources

in the literature for 20 out the 22 indicators developed (see Table 3-4). In addition, seven

volunteers with expertise in mathematics education examined and provided feedback on the

development of three representative indicators from the source literature.

For the second phase of the study seven volunteers with expertise in mathematics

education provided feedback on the initial coding scheme for the classroom data and its

application to a short video clip from the data. In addition, three volunteers with expertise in

mathematics education were trained to use the framework for coding and asked to code several

short portions of the classroom video. These volunteers and I then discussed the coding of each

incident in the video portions. Working together, there were no substantial differences between

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the codes that I had assigned and what the group agreed was appropriate. Triangulation of

classroom data about students’ conceptions of mathematics was provided by the use of both

classroom observations using the framework and student interviews related to conceptions of

mathematics. Finally, the participating teacher was asked to read and comment on the

manuscript. This member check (Yin, 2011) helped to ensure the accuracy of my data and that

my interpretation of that data was deemed reasonable by the teacher involved in the study.

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 Chapter 5 Findings

Analysis of classroom interactions using the framework of indicators provided substantial

insight into the ways in which students in this class conceive of mathematics as sensible. The

framework provided both indicators that identified important incidents and an organizational tool

for examining student conceptions within several categories. The insight gained from the

indicators combined with information gathered in the student interviews provide a rich picture of

the conceptions of students in this class and the ways that those conceptions may have grown and

changed over the course of an academic year.

Findings related to expecting explanations

Students in this class expect that mathematics is sensible enough that it can be explained.

They demonstrated this by providing explanations for their own mathematics and by seeking

explanations for mathematics presented to them. They also expressed strong agreement with

statements about the existence of and importance of explanations in mathematics.

Types of Evidence

There were four indicators and three conceptions statements related to students’

conceptions that mathematics was sensible enough to have explanations. Two of the indicators

were related to students’ engagement in providing explanations: justifying, that is, explaining

why something works or is true and explaining answers, that is, explaining how a problem was

done. The other two indicators were related to students’ seeking explanations: seeking

explanations for ideas and procedures and seeking explanations for why an answer is correct or

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incorrect. The conceptions statements asked students to discuss whether they agreed or

disagreed that: “Knowing how to solve a problem is as important as getting the solution”

(Brown, et al., 1988), “It is not important to understand why a procedure works as long as you

get the right answer” (Kloosterman & Stage, 1992), and “A lot of things in math must simply be

accepted as true and remembered; there really isn’t any explanation for them” (Carter &

Norwood, 1997).

Providing explanations

Two of the indicators relating to explanations in mathematics involved student

engagement in the act of providing explanations. The explain answers indicator was used when

students explained how they arrived at a conclusion, whereas the justifying indicator was used

when students explained why a conclusion or action was valid. Students displayed these

behaviors frequently during both the fall and the spring observations.

Explaining how

Explaining how they solved a problem or arrived at a mathematical conclusion seemed to

be a central feature of how the students in this class engaged in mathematics. There were 20

coded incidents of explaining how during the fall observation and 16 during the spring. During

the first two classes observed in the fall, most of the explanations were prompted by either the

teacher or by another student asking such questions as, “How did you do it?” After these classes,

students were seldom prompted to explain their answers. The teacher usually sought student

volunteers by asking questions like, “Who wants number 2?” or sometimes simply, “Number 4?”

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Students took this as a cue to begin describing, step by step, how they solved the problem. The

students’ emphasis on explaining how is highlighted by the fact that they usually provided an

explanation before giving the answer to the problem. Students in this class explained how they

solved a problem an average of three to four times per class, with that average remaining fairly

consistent between the fall and spring observations.

Some of the explanations provided by students were fairly complete but rather

mechanical. For example, during one of the spring observations, the second warm-up problem

was: Solve for x: 3(2x – 9) = 5x + 4. When a student was asked to, “do number 2” she provided

the following explanation for how she did the problem.

To begin with I distributed before I did the solving. I did 3 times 2x is 6x. 3 times

negative 9 is negative 27. And from there equals 5x plus 4. … minus 5x on each side …

the double 5x’s cancel out … and 6x minus 5x equals 1x minus 27 equals 4. … plus 27

on each side. 27s cancel out. 1x equals 31. Divide each side by 1. The 1s cancel out.

31 divided by 1 equals, x equals 31.

As the student spoke, the student intern in the class worked out the problem on the board. This

type of complete, detailed but very mechanical explanation occurred occasionally but was not the

norm. It occurred most often with routine problems such as solving equations and was more

likely to occur when the discussion was being led by the student intern rather than by the teacher.

Far more common was an explanation embedded in an interchange between the teacher

and one or more students. The following exchange, which occurred during a fall observation,

was typical of this type of exchange. One of the warm-up problems asked students to find the

area of the trapezoid shown in Figure 5-1.

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Figure 5-1. Warm-up problem – Find the area.

After one student argued that if you completed the triangular portion of the figure you

would have a rectangle of the same size as the rectangular portion of the figure, the following

exchange took place.

Teacher: You’re on the right track Jim but you don’t have the right numbers as yet.

Beth next. Yup. You know I’m going to call on everybody every day.

Beth: Since the bottom, like, it’s the 16 but they’re two different shapes so you

would, the top of the rectangle is six centimeters so the bottom of it is six

centimeters

Teacher: Ah. Do you see what Beth is telling us? (The teacher underlines the

bottom of the rectangular portion in red.) That red length has to be six.

How does she know that?

Jim: Because it’s parallel to the top.

Teacher: Yeah. Because it’s, here let’s pull the rectangle out (teacher draws a

rectangle off to the side). That’s six so that has to be six, right? (Teacher

writes a six on the top and bottom of the rectangle as he speaks.) Isn’t that

the way rectangles work? Okay, keep going Beth. I like your thinking.

Beth: And then since you have 10 left on the triangle you can tell

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 Teacher: Ah. So you’re saying that this length - here let me draw the whole shape.

(Teacher draws the remainder of the trapezoid using the rectangle he has

already drawn.) You’re saying that this length (he underlines the base of

the triangle) has to be what?

Beth: 10

Teacher: 10. Because together

Beth: they make 16.

Teacher: They make this 16.

In this exchange Beth provides an explanation for how she determined that the length of the base

of the triangle was 10 as the teacher restates, clarifies, and illustrates the explanation.

Most of the incidents coded as students explaining answers took place during whole class

discussion while the class was going over warm-up problems or other problems that the teacher

had written on the board for students to work on. In addition to these episodes in whole class

discussion, there a many fragments of conversation between two or more students as they

worked independently to indicate that students also explained answers to one another. One of

these came during a spring observation in which students were working on finding the equation

of a line when given two ordered pairs.

Jenny: Did you get ½, 1 over 2?

Beth: Uh, yeah.

Jenny: How did you do it?

Rachael: So it would be 2 …

Jenny: Why would it be 2?

Rachel: ’Cause you have to put in y into y equals mx plus b. So you pick a y

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 Jenny: You picked, you picked 2, what’s, what’s , oh!

Rachel and Jenny: It’s point 5.

Rachel: And then times …

Jenny: Oh, so you just changed the ½ to point 5

Rachael: Yeah

It seems evident in this clip that Rachael is explaining her work to Jenny. However, like so

many of the student-to-student exchanges, it is fragmented and it is difficult to pick this

conversation out of the ones that surround it. It is also often difficult to know what problem the

students are working on. The frequency of these types of clips makes it evident that students are

explaining their work to other students. Unfortunately, the difficulty identifying these episodes

on the recordings means that they are probably seriously underrepresented in the coding of the

data.

It is very rare in this class to hear a single student provide a complete, cohesive

explanation for how they solved a problem. Both explanations provided during whole class

discussions and those among a few students, display a classroom pattern of discourse in which

explanations are formed in a joint effort of teacher and students. Explanations are not treated as

a performance by an individual but as the work of the whole group. This is seen in the episode

with Beth, previously described. In this episode it is not Beth explaining and everyone else

listening. It is Beth explaining a piece, the teacher representing the work on the board as he

reiterates her points, and another student jumping in to justify one of Beth’s assertions. After the

excerpt above, this conversation continues with several other students entering the discussion to

explain how they solved other pieces of the problem and then how they put everything together

to answer the original question. This class’s common practice of crafting group explanations

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seems to indicate that, for these students, explaining how is not only a central part of what it

means to do mathematics but that it is a viewed as a shared endeavor.

Students’ comments during interviews also provide evidence of the central role that

explaining plays in their mathematics. The best evidence for this is seen in students’ reactions to

the statement, “Knowing how to solve a problem is as important as getting the solution” (Brown

et al., 1988). Overall, students agreed with the statement, although many of them stopped short

of strongly agreeing. The group that placed the card the lowest was split on where to place the

card. Two of the members advocated for placing the card in the middle of the continuum.

I: (Reading the card) “Knowing how to solve a problem is as important as

getting the solution.”

Joanne: I mean, I guess that is in the middle for me because, obviously finding the

solution is important but knowing how to be able to figure out how to find

the solution is important too because you’re going to use the procedure if

you know how to use it more then you will find the solution. [Joanne

placed the card about midway along their agree/disagree continuum.]

Zach: I’m still, I’m still thinking of the 50/50 part because it’s just, altogether

it’s just, well, you know, if you know how to do the, the problem, like

solve the problem it’s, and you know the answer to it, it’s just like saying,

uh, how do I put it? Um, if you that, I’m just going to go to a few

examples. Like, if you like, um, like 2 plus 2 and you know the answer to

it, like, very quickly, like just off the top of your head, you were already

taught like over and over and over, it’s good to memor-, it’s good to

memorize the math because, so you can do so much stuff with math. It’s

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 uncountable. So, like, it’s good to know and also like, if you know how to

do the procedure it’s, you don’t, if you know how to do the procedure but

you don’t know what the answer is it’s always 50/50 if you get it right or

wrong. So I’m, yeah, I’m in the middle.

Zach seems to be arguing for the need for a balance between understanding explanations

and the value of automaticity and recall of basic facts in mathematics. Joanne’s concern for a

balance between the value of knowing how and the value of having the correct answer was

echoed by a student from another group who defended her group’s placement of the card near

Strongly Agree by stating, “I think it’s important to understand it before you can get just the

answer but you also need to be able to get the answer or else you’re probably going to fail math.”

The reaction of the third member of Joanne and Zach’s group was more typical of most other

students’ responses to this statement. The above discussion continued:

I: Okay. So you two are definitely in the middle. Are you in the middle or –

Jerry: I’m kind of thinking that, definitely figuring out the problem is way more

important than, um

Zach: Finding the answer.

Jerry: Yeah so, definitely

I: So where would you put it? “Knowing how to solve a problem is as

important as getting the solution.”

Jerry: I’m going to go, like, probably here [Zach placed the card close to the

strongly disagree end of the continuum.] because I’m a little bit

disagreeing with how it’s saying it’s just as important as figuring out the

answer.

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 I: You’re saying it’s more important.

Jerry: Yeah, it’s more important. It’s definitely more important to know how to

do it than figuring out the answer. The answer would probably come last.

It’s not, solution, or, er, problem-solving thing – it’s, ‘cause I want to

know how to do it before I can find the answer.

Zach: It’s just like saying breakfast before lunch or kind of last getting dessert.

Although Jerry places the statement closer to disagree, it is not because he disagrees with the

intent of the statement but because he feels that the statement is not worded strongly enough.

For him understanding how to do a problem is almost a prerequisite for being able to find the

correct answer. Zach seems to agree with him, using the analogy of breakfast before lunch and

dessert last.

The conception that understanding how to do a problem is not only as important as

getting the answer but that it necessarily precedes being able to get the correct answer was

echoed by members of several groups. For two of the groups the discussion was very short and

emphatic.

Group 6:

I: Let’s start with, (Reading the card) “Knowing how to solve a problem is

as important as getting the solution.” “Knowing how to solve a problem is

as important as getting the solution.”

Beth: Well, if you didn’t know how to solve the problem

Rob: Yeah, you

Beth: you can’t get solution.

I: Okay.

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 Beth: Like, I would put that on strongly agree.

Rob: Yeah.

Group 3:

I: (Reading the card) “Knowing how to solve a problem is as important as

getting the solution.”

Rachel: Well, you have to know how to get the solution,

Sarah: Yeah, you,

Rachel: In order to solve it you have to know what you are doing and then, to get

the solution, you have to know how to solve it.

I: So you’re basically saying you really can’t solve it without knowing how.

Sarah & Rachel: Yeah.

As was true for Jerry in an earlier group, for these students knowing how a problem is solved is a

necessary precursor to getting a correct answer. The insistence of these students on the

importance of knowing how a problem is solved and their tendency to work together to produce

explanations for how a problem is solved are indicators that these students conceive of

mathematics as sensible enough that there are explanations for how problems are solved.

The speed with which explaining became a classroom norm makes it likely that the

tendency these students had to engage in explaining how they did mathematics existed before the

current school year. During classes at the beginning of the school year, students, when asked to

“do” or “go over” a problem sometimes presented only their answer. The teacher would then ask

for an explanation. The following exchange occurred as the class is going over answers to the

warm-up problems and is typical of the way in which the teacher prompted explanations at the

start of the school year.

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 Teacher: Number two, what’s my area? Eddie, what did you say?

Eddie: I got 50.

Teacher: you got 50, because?

At this point the student explained how he found the answer. After the first couple of

classes of the school year, this type of exchange seldom occurred because when asked about the

answer to a problem or to “do” a problem, students generally began by explaining how they did

the problem, presenting their answer only after the explanation was complete. Students’

reactions to conception statements about the importance of knowing how seem to take the

importance of explanations for how to do a problem as a given. None of the students provided a

reason for why understanding how was important, it simply was. One student attributed to

teachers, in general, an emphasis on how to do a problem. He stated, “Teachers want you to

know how to do it and they don’t really care about if you get the right answer. Like they want

you to get the right answer but it’s more about learning.” A belief in the importance of

explaining how they got an answer to a mathematical problem seems to be very strong in this

group of students. The unquestioning acceptance of the conception statement, the tendency to

engage in the behavior without prompting almost from the very beginning of the school year, and

the ease with which explaining answers became a class norm, indicate that this tendency likely

predates their involvement in this study.

Explaining why

Students in this class engaged in explaining why they arrived at mathematical

conclusions as often as they explained how they solved problems. There were 22 coded

incidents of justifying during the fall observations and 17 during the spring. However, there was

78
a marked change between the fall and the spring observations in the role that teacher prompting

played in students’ tendency to engage in this behavior. During the fall observation, almost all

episodes of justifying were initiated by questions from the teacher. The following incidents are

typical of the type of prompting that was very prevalent during the fall observations. In this first

episode students are going over the warm-up problem shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. Warm-up problem – What fraction is this?

Teacher: Okay. Number one, quickly. What fraction is this? What did you say,

Jenny?

Jenny: Five twelfths.

Teacher: Five twelfths is correct. Why five?

Jenny: Because five out of the 12 is shaded in or taken away or.

Teacher: Are they the ones we want or the ones we don’t want?

Jenny: They are the ones we want.

Teacher: Okay.

Jenny: I was just saying they weren’t taken away.

Teacher: Okay. So five. And why 12?

Jenny: Because there was 12 at the beginning.

Another example of this type of exchange occurs during the third fall observation, again

as the class is going over a warm-up problem. (See figure 5-3.)

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Figure 5-3. Warm-up problem. What’s my area?

Teacher: What’s my area? What shape is this? Rachel?

Rachel: It’s a triangle.

Teacher: And the formula for the area of a triangle?

Rachel: Length times width.

Teacher: And then what?

Rachel: And then divide it by, or, yeah, times it by two or… I don’t know. I’m

confused now. I’m confusing myself.

Jim: Divide it by two.

Beth: Divide it by two.

Rachel: Yeah, divide it by two, that’s what I meant.

Teacher: [The teacher writes on the board.] Why do we divide by two?

Beth: Because it’s half of

Rachel: Because you do length times width and then there’s like another triangle

like

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 Jerry: On top of

Rachel: Like there but not there

Teacher: Yeah. Let me go back to my square mile. [He points to a square that he

had drawn on the board earlier to represent a square mile.]

Rachel: It’s half of that.

Teacher: A triangle is half of a rectangle. [Teacher draws the diagonal of the

square.] Half is going to be thrown away, [Teacher shades in half of the

square.] half is going to be kept. So, we divide by two to say we’re

throwing half away and we’re keeping half.

These incidents illustrate the role of teacher prompting in justifying in the beginning of

the school year. We can contrast this with students’ usual behavior at the end of the school year

as illustrated in the following incident. The teacher solicits students suggestions for a function

and for values at which they will evaluate the function (see Figure 5-4 for the photo of what the

teacher writes). As the teacher fills in the values, the following discussion occurs.

Figure 5-4. Board problem: finding f(x).

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 Teacher: [Pointing at the first parenthesis, currently blank.] Numbers?

Sarah: Six.

Mike: Five. Four.

Sarah: Three. Two, one.

Beth: Negative two.

Mike: Negative one. Zero.

Jenny: Four.

Mike: Negative zero.

Rachel: One.

Sarah: Is there a negative zero?

Jenny: There’s only one zero ‘cause it’s in between the negative and the positive

numbers.

Here, Jenny offers Sarah not only an answer to her question but a justification for why it

must be true. By the end of the school year it has become commonplace for students to provide

an unprompted justification when they make a mathematical statement.

In the following excerpt a student, while working to solve the problem shown in

Figure 5-5, tries to justify to the teacher why the hint provided is not helpful.

Figure 5-5. Warm-up problem. Angles of a perfect pentagon.

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 Rob: If your hint is, “what’s a 360”, 360 is a circle. That’s not a circle so you

couldn’t use 360 because there’d be parts of it that

Teacher: If you started here, …

In this instance the student does not finish his justification because the teacher interrupts with an

explanation. The important point here is that the student does not stop with stating that the hint

does not work; he tries to justify why it will not work.

In another episode, again from the spring semester, a student has explained how she

solved the equation 7x – 9 = 5(3x + 1). A second student volunteers an alternate approach.

Sarah: I got the same answer but a different way.

[The teacher asks her to hold off for a minute while the class finishes solving the equation

and arrives at a numerical value for x.]

Sarah: Just kidding around. It’s similar but not completely

Teacher: Okay. But I’m still curious to see what you did.

Sarah: So I had the whole, the whole 7x minus 9 equals 5 parentheses … [As the

student speaks the teacher erases a section of the board and rewrites the

problem. (See figure 5-6.]

Figure 5-6. Warm-up problem: linear equation

Teacher: Okay, watch this girl like a hawk. See if you can see if she makes a

mistake.

Sarah: Minus 3x from both sides

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 [The teacher writes -3x underneath each side of the equation.]

Sarah: 4x minus 9 is

Teacher: You’re in trouble. You’re in trouble because it’s not 3x.

Beth: Yeah.

Rob: You have to follow PEMDAS.

Jenny: You have parentheses.

At this point the teacher follows up on the justification provided by Rob and Jenny for why it is

not correct to begin solving this problem by subtracting 3x from both sides of the equation. In

this incident, as in the ones already described, the students offer justifications without direct

prompting from either the teacher or from other students.

Students in this class provide justifications for mathematical statements at a rate of about

four per class period during both the fall and spring semesters. However, during the fall

observation all but two of the student justifications were prompted, most often by the teacher,

whereas almost three-fourths of the justifications provided by students during the spring semester

were, like those illustrated above, unprompted. The tendency of students in this class to engage

in justifying and the change over the school year in the role of prompting in students’

engagement in justifying seems to indicate that, over the course of the school year, explaining

why things in mathematics must be true became an important part of mathematics for these

students.

The importance of justifying is also evident in students’ reactions to the statement, “It is

not important to know why a procedure works as long as you get the right answer” (Kloosterman

& Stage, 1992). Students uniformly disagreed with the statement, sometimes vehemently and

indignantly. One student stated, “I feel like there’s no point in doing it if you don’t understand

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why you are doing it.” Interestingly, in expressing their disagreement with this statement, almost

every student provided reasons why the statement was not true. Students expressed concerns

that without know why a procedure works they would not be able to do it themselves or to apply

it in other settings. One student stated, “You have to know how it works in order to do it again.”

Another stated, “If you get everything right, yeah, you’ll get a good grade but you if you try to

apply it to … work or something it’s not going to help.” In addition to these practical reasons

students provided for why it is important to know why things work one student provided another

reason. He stated, “I wouldn’t enjoy math if I didn’t know why, like what I need to do to get the

answer, like why I was doing it.” The interviews with students were conducted at the end of the

school year and provide evidence that students think they should provide explanations for why

things are true in mathematics.

The students’ perception of the importance of justifying in doing mathematics seems to

have changed over the course of the school year. This change is evidenced by the marked

increase in students’ unprompted justifications between the fall and the spring observations. The

explanations given by students in reacting to the statement about the importance of knowing why

are in contrast to the unreasoned but equally strong reaction to the statement about the

importance of knowing how and may indicate that the importance of knowing why is a relatively

new belief for them. Further evidence of this is provided by one student who, when asked what

in the sorting of conceptions statements might have been different if this activity had been done a

year earlier, stated that last year she would have agreed much more that understanding why was

not important. The combined evidence of students’ engagement in the behavior of justifying, the

changing role of prompting in students’ justifying, and students’ statements about the importance

of understanding why demonstrate that students in this class see mathematics as something

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sensible enough that they can justify their ideas. The evidence further suggests that this

conception is one that has developed over the course of this school year.

Seeking explanations

By the end of the school year, students had come to expect that there were, at least

sometimes, explanations for ideas and procedures and explanations for why things in

mathematics were correct or incorrect. During the fall observations there were no indicators that

students sought explanations for ideas, procedures, or answers in mathematics. However, during

the spring observation students asked for explanations for procedures nine times and

explanations for why something was correct four times. In some cases, students asking for an

explanation not only asked, but persisted in asking until it was explained to their satisfaction.

For example, when the teacher, in the course of reducing the fraction x/x3, “reduces” (divides

out) an x from the numerator and denominator and replaces the reduced x with a one, a student

asks why it reduces to one instead of to zero. Other students treat the answer as obvious but the

student keeps asking the question until she receives an answer that she understands.

T: What’s left on top?

Mike: Zero.

Sarah: One.

Rob: One

T: One. Thank you, Rob.

Beth: Why?

T: Because when things cancel, it’s something over itself. What’s 8 over 8?

Jess: One.

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 Beth: Zero.

Rob: One.

Jenny: ONE!

T: If you have a pizza divided into up into 8 slices and you eat 8 slices, how

much pizza -

Mike: You ate one pizza.

Beth: I know but you don’t have any left.

Jenny: That’s not what he’s asking!

Beth: Sorry for not being smart.

T: No, no, no. This isn’t telling us how much is left. This is telling us how

much went down your gullet. Okay?

Beth: Everyone is just so stressy.

T: So, something over itself, something over itself makes one.

Even though student interactions in this episode became somewhat heated, Beth persisted until

she received an explanation that satisfied her.

Students in this class seek explanations not only from the teacher from one another.

About half of the incidents in which students seek explanations are ones in which students ask

other students for an explanation. For example, as students are practicing simplifying algebraic

fractions one student, probably working on a problem in which the entire numerator reduced out,

asks other students, “Why do you have to put in a fraction bar?” For this student it appears that

putting in a vinculum was a procedure and the student wanted to know why the procedure

needed to be followed.

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 In interviews, students were asked to respond to the statement, “A lot of things in math

must simply be accepted as true and remembered: there really isn’t any explanation for them”

(Carter & Norwood, 1997). Although many students had difficulty untangling the meaning of

the compound sentence, the overall consensus was that most things in mathematics did have

explanations. Students’ difficulty interpreting the sentence was demonstrated by several students

who focused only the role of memory in learning mathematics. One student stated, “There are

some things in math that you don’t obviously have to know. Like, you’re not going to remember

everything from school.” One group was upfront about their difficulty interpreting the

statement. When the statement was first presented one student in the group stated, “I don’t really

understand.” When the group was asked at the end of the interview if there were any statements

that they wanted to revisited, one group member pointed to this statement and said, “I’m still

kind of confused about that one.”

Despite the difficulties that some students had interpreting the statement, most groups did

use it as a springboard to discuss whether things in mathematics have explanations. Several

students noted that there were some things in mathematics that did not have explanations. One

group presented as an example the formula for the area of a circle.

Jim: I don’t really understand [the statement].

I: Okay. There are some things in math that have to accept to be true. Mr.

Wingate tells you that, um, you know, anything raised to the zero is one

and you just have to accept that that’s true, there’s no explanation for it.

Jim: Oh, all right, yeah.

I: So there are times when there just isn’t an explanation.

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 Mike: Well like the formulas for like finding the area of a circle, we don’t really

know how that works. We just know it.

I: Okay. Do you think there is an explanation and you just don’t know it yet

or is there just not an explanation?

Mike: I just don’t think there is an explanation.

I: Okay. It’s just one of those things – the mysteries of the universe.

Mike: Yeah.

I: Okay.

In spite of their identification of exemptions, students, overall, indicated that they

believed that things in mathematics did have explanations. The following discussion reflects this

overall sense:

I: A lot of things in math must simply be accepted as true and remembered

because there really isn’t any explanation for them.

Beth: That’s wrong.

Rob: Well, I mean right now, anyway, it’s wrong but I’ve walked into some

math classes where I feel like they’re like

Beth: Well, that’s because you don’t know what they’re doing.

Rob: I know, yeah. So

I: But you believe that there is an explanation?

Beth: Yeah.

Rob: Yes.

I: Okay.

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 It is evident, both by students’ actions and statements, that the student in this class ended

the school year believing that at least some things in mathematics had explanations. Students,

during the spring semester, stated that things should have explanations and sought explanations

from both the teacher and from each other. Because of the lack of indicators during the fall

observation, there is no evidence that students had such a conception of mathematics at the

beginning of this course. One student evaluated the truth of the statement about some things in

mathematics not having an explanation in light of the current class. He stated, “Right now,

anyway, it’s wrong but I’ve been in some math classes where I felt like …” It is evident that this

student perceives that, in this class, things in mathematics have explanations but that this has not

always been the case in other mathematics classes. This evidence, coupled with the dramatic

change in the students’ tendency to ask for explanations between the fall and spring

observations, lead me to conclude that students in this class believe that mathematics is sensible

enough that they can seek explanations and that this conception likely grew over the course of

the school year.

Summary

Students in this class believe that things in mathematics should have explanations. They

seem to have been socialized to an expectation that they explain how they do mathematical

problems even before this class began. By the end of the school year, students engaged in all four

types of behavior related to explanations and expressed strong agreement with statements

relating to the importance of knowing how and why things work in mathematics. Some students

are firmly convinced that everything in mathematics can be explained while others, citing

examples such as 2*2 equals 4 and the formula for the area of a circle, believe some things in

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mathematics do have not have explanations and must just be accepted and remembered. The

students showed growth over the course of the school year in the number of indicators displayed,

the type of indicators displayed, and the incidence of indicators without prompting. Students in

this class provided explanations when doing mathematics and expected that explanations would

be provided them. These actions indicate that these students conceive of mathematics as

sufficiently sensible that it can be explained.

Findings related to expecting connections

Students in this class conceived of mathematics as sensible enough that they expected

and verbalized connections between mathematical topics and between mathematics and real-

world contexts. They also expressed strong agreement with conceptions statements about

connections within mathematics.

Types of evidence

In the framework of indicators there were initially six indicators related to students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible enough to be connected. Five of these indicators,

recognizing similarity, adapting solution methods, seeking connections, ignoring size of

numbers, and using multiple representations, were related to students seeing connections within

mathematics, that is connections between different ideas, representations, or topics in

mathematics. The fifth indicator, contextualizing/decontextualizing was related to students

seeing connections between mathematics and real-world contexts. During the data analysis an

additional indicator, noticing, was added and used to code instances in which students

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spontaneously indicated that they saw a connection between what was happening in the problem

immediately before them and something else in mathematics.

There were two conceptions statements that were designed to elicit information about

students’ conceptions about connections and mathematics. Students’ comments on their level of

agreement with the statement “Math is made up of unrelated topics” (Brown et al., 1988) elicited

information both on students’ ideas about connections within mathematics and their ideas about

connections between mathematics and real-world or academic contexts. The statement “Math is

made up of ideas, terms, and connections” (Grigutsch & Torner, 1998), which was also designed

to stimulate discussion about connections in mathematics, proved problematic since student

groups had a difficult time interpreting the statement. One group focused on the ideas of “terms”

in mathematics, one group focused on whether mathematics is comprised of “ideas,”, and several

other groups focused on whether the list provided in the statement was complete. None of the

groups used this statement to comment on the connected nature of mathematics so all of the

interview information about students’ conception of connections is from analysis of students’

comments on the statement “Math is made up of unrelated topics.”

Connections within mathematics

Students in this class conceive of mathematics as sensible enough that they believe that

there should be internal connections within mathematics. Both the numbers and types of

connections made by students changed between the fall and spring observations.

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Mathematical connections during fall observations

During the fall observations there were only five student indicators that were coded as

expecting or seeing mathematical connections. Three of these involved students simply

observing that mathematical objects were the same. In the following example, the teacher put

two problems on the board: a) 5/8 + 3/2 and b) 5/8 – 3/2. The class had already gone over the

solution to part a, converting the problem to 5/8 + 12/8.

T: Letter b, number 2, letter b. Mike, want to do it?

Mike: Oh, yeah, sure. You get the same thing, like, yeah. You put 5 minus 12

equals negative 7 over 8.

The student noticed that the numbers were the same and, thus, they did not need to redo the

initial steps of the problem.

In another incident, the teacher had drawn a clock face on the board and labeled it with

degree measures rather than the numerals 1 through 12 (see figure 5-7).

Figure 5-7. Clock face labeled in degrees.

After the teacher draws in the hands of the clock and asks students if it makes sense, they offer

several observations about the clock face.

T: Would that make sense?

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 Mike: Yeah.

T: What would they be, those numbers?

Beth: 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Mike: How many minutes there are?

Jenny: There’s not 12 numbers on the clock.

Eddie: There’s 360 degrees all the way around.

T: What did you say, Eddie?

Eddie: There’s 360 degrees all the way around and 180 is half of 360, so that

mean’s it’s 12.

T: So, this clock is in degrees, right? [T writes “DEGREES” under the clock

face.] Because we know that there are 360 degrees

Zach: [speaking at the same time] That’s a right angle.

T: all the way around. Sorry?

Zach: It’s 90 degrees and it’s a right angle.

T: 90 degrees makes a right angle. [T draws in a right angle between 360 and

90 on the clock face] Yes, because the 360 is also zero, right?

Throughout this incident students were noticing similarities between the clock face that the

teacher had drawn and what they knew about degree measure. In each case, the students appear

to be noticing a similarity between two mathematical objects.

The other two incidents during the fall observations that were coded as making

mathematical connections involved students making connections between different mathematical

problems or approaches to a problem. In one instance, the teacher has written the problem

7/3*4/5 on the board. The following exchange ensues:

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 T: What about that? Do you know how to multiply them?

Eddie: Just go across.

Joanne: Like you have to go 7 and 5 and 4 and 3

Zach: 12 over..

T: [T draws a horizontal arrow above the problem.] Straight across. Straight

across.

Joanne: Since when?

Beth: Since forever.

T: [Teacher draws a horizontal arrow below the problem.] As long as I’ve

been teaching.

Mike: 48 over 15.

Rachel: 48 over 15.

Beth: You’re getting it confused with division.

In this instance Beth connects Joanne’s incorrect strategy for multiplying fractions with an

algorithm for dividing fractions.

In the other instance the teacher is having a student talk him through the problem

5/8 + 3/2.

T: What do you like for a common denominator?

Joanne: 8

T: Do you write two 8s or one?

Joanne: One.

T: Write it like that?

Joanne: Yeah.

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 T: Okay.

Eddie: It doesn’t matter.

In this episode Eddie seems to recognize that the two different representations are the same and

both are viable approaches to the problem. The students in each of these cases are making

mathematical connections but the connections are limited in nature. The limited number of

indicators involving connecting mathematics internally and the limited nature of the connections

made may indicate that students did not come in to this class expecting mathematics to be a

connected system.

Mathematical connections during spring observations

During the spring observations there were 13 coded indicators related to students seeing

connections within mathematics. In addition to the almost threefold increase in the number of

indicators, all but one of the indicators from the spring semester went beyond simply noticing

surface-level similarities between mathematical objects.

Four of the indicators were related to connecting multiple representations of the same

object. For example, as the class is going over the answer to the problem (5x2y3)2, several

students note that they, incorrectly, got a coefficient of 10 rather than 25 in the expanded form.

One student provides the following explanation for her error:

T: Just out of curiosity, how many people got 10?

Jim: Me.

Beth: Ten what?

T: Instead of 25?

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 Jenny: I just got that completely wrong. I did 5xy to the second times 2. So I got

5xy to the fourth.

In this episode, Jenny is working to connect how she expanded the problem to the correct

expansion and trying to determine how she must have interpreted the original expression to get

her answer. Although she is not accurate in her assessment, this episode shows her trying to

make a mathematical connection.

In a similar episode, the teacher is discussing a problem from a recent quiz.

T: (Pointing to the right hand side of the equation shown in figure 5-8.)

Now, I had people who got all the way to the right answer, then did this.

(Teacher writes the reciprocal of the expression shown in the right hand

side of the equation in figure 5-8.)

Figure 5-8. Expression with exponents to simplify

Rob: You only do that when it’s negative!

Beth: Only if it’s negative.

In this episode Rob and Beth not only recognize the error that students were making but

connected the incorrect answer to a problem situation in which it would be the correct answer.

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In each of these cases the students were making connections between different problems and

representations.

Three of the indicators related to seeing connections were about students noticing

something in the mathematical object under consideration that was related to another

mathematical idea. In one instance the teacher had plotted a set of data points and a student

observed, “you have an outlier.” The class had not been talking about outliers and this appeared

to be a case of a student observing a characteristic of the mathematical representation and

connecting it to a concept learned in another context. In another instance, looking at the same

plot, students were asked what they observed about the plot. One student observed that it

seemed to have a positive slope. Again, the concept of slope had not been discussed in this

context; indeed, it had only been discussed in the context of graphs of lines and, at this point, no

best-fit line had yet been drawn. In the initial coding structure there was no indicator for coding

these incidents; they were coded simply as seeing connections, I added an indicator, noticing

mathematical connections, to provide a way to code incidents where students appeared to be

noticing particular aspects within the current mathematical context and making a connection to

mathematical terms and ideas from another context.

The other important type of indicator that students were seeing connections within

mathematics was the recognition of the underlying similarity of mathematical objects. There

were five indicators of this coded during the five days of the spring observation. In one instance

    
  
a student had asked the teacher about the practical purpose of something like
 .
 

Mike: When are we ever going to use this?

T: This?

Mike: Yeah.

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Sarah: Every day.

T: Are you kidding? In the grocery store, if you buy, if you buy 20 bottles of

Tide and it says

Rachel: You wouldn’t though.

Rob: We do.

T: (He writes on the board as he continues to speak.) 4x7 washes, right, this is

what it says right on the package. x to the 7th washes and if you buy 20

bottles, that’s now good for 20 times x to the 7th washes. That’s very

important in the grocery store.

Rob: Doesn’t it say it does like 40 full loads or something compared to the, like,

bargain brand which only does like

Beth: It likes cause like, then that other brand

Sarah: Or just buy the biggest box.

[As several students continue to discuss the best strategy for purchasing

laundry detergent, the teacher begins to draw a picture of speed boat on

the board and explaining details of his sketch to the class. “they have

smoke coming out here, a driver here, a big propeller here …”]

T: The speed of the boat - now every boat designer knows this, I’m not just

making this up – the speed of the boat raised to the seventh power is equal

to something, I don’t know what, times the horse power. (As he speaks he

writes the equation (speed)7=□hp on the board.) So if you want a boat to

go fast, you can’t just put the horse power up by 10 or 20. It makes no

99
 difference. If you want a boat to go fast, the horsepower has to go up by a

bunch.

Mike: I meant that problem, right there.

T: What problem.

Rob: Yeah, that’s what that is.

Here Rob appears to be connecting the equation for the speed boat with the original expression

by recognizing the similarity in the underlying exponential structure of the expressions.

In another, similar, incident the class had just finished finding the value of g(x) = x2 – 1 for

various values of x. When then presented with the problem of finding values for h(x)=1/x, one

student is unsure how to proceed. Another student points out that “it’s the same thing.” The

student seems to be pointing toward each expression’s role as a function rule and, thus, the

similar approach that one would use to find values of the function. Although there were no

indicators during the fall observation in which students appeared to make connections based on

the underlying mathematical structure of representations, during the spring observations, there

was approximately one indicator of this type during each class period.

During interviews conducted in the spring semester, students also stated that they

believed that topics and ideas in mathematics were connected. Groups of students were asked

about their level of agreement with the statement, “Math is made up of unrelated topics.” Of the

students who interpreted this statement as relating to mathematical topics being connected to

other mathematical topics, all agreed with the statement. Typical of the reactions was this

exchange:

I: Math is made up of unrelated topics.

Jenny: That’s not true.

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 Larry: Not true at all. [Jenny places the card at the strongly disagree end of the

continuum.]

I: Tell me more about that.

Larry: That’ because all of them are intertwined somehow, whether it be

multiplication, division, addition …

Jenny: Well, like sometimes you need to know how to do certain things before

you can do other things.

Interestingly, there were two groups that began by stating that they only slightly

disagreed but very quickly talked themselves into strongly disagreeing. The following

discussion is one such episode.

Beth: No, I think some interconnect with each other.

Rob: Yeah.

Beth: Sometimes, like, in order to, like for exponents, in order to figure out the

problems you have to subtract which is linked to subtraction or you have

to multiply if it’s in parentheses.

Rob: Well like, yeah, PEMDAS

Beth: That connects two different topics so … I do disagree with that. [Beth

places the card about ¾ of the way along the continuum for strongly

disagree.]

I: Okay. But not all the way to strongly disagree?

Beth: Right.

I: [Rob firmly slaps the card at the strongly disagree end of the continuum.]

Or is it?

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 Beth goes on to agree that the card belongs all the way at strongly disagree. The fact that

all of the groups strongly disagreed with the statement is further evidence that students in this

class saw mathematics as sensible enough that they expected there to be connections within

mathematics. The two groups that began the discussion more ambivalent and talked themselves

into strong disagreement may indicate that this was an idea they had not considered before and

may be a new conception for them that has developed over the course of this academic year.

During observations at the beginning of the school year, there were few indicators that

students conceived of mathematics as sensible enough to look for connections between

mathematical topics. In addition, the indicators that were in evidence tended to rely on linking

surface-level characteristics of mathematical objects. During observations at the end of the

school year, there were two to three indicators during each class period that students were

making connections between mathematical topics and objects. In addition, by the end of the

school year, students expressed strong disagreement with the statement, “Math is made up of

unrelated topics.” It is evident that the students in this class see mathematics as sensible enough

to be internally connected. Further, it seems likely that this conception of mathematics has

grown over the course the school year.

Connections between mathematics and other contexts

The indicator contextualizing/decontextualizing was designed for coding connections that

students made between mathematics and real world contexts. I use the terms in a manner similar

to that of the Standards for Mathematical Practice of the CCSS-M (NGA & CCSSO, 2010) but

expand the ideas to code any attempt to connect the mathematics to real-world referents as

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contextualizing and any attempt to represent or reason mathematically about a real-world

situation as decontextualizing.

Attempting to connect mathematics to real-life contexts was one of the most common

ways that students in this class demonstrated that they conceived of mathematics as sensible.

During the spring semester there were 21 coded indicators that students were connecting

mathematics to other contexts: two during the fall observations and 19 during the spring

observations. Some of these connections were as surface-level as simply mapping visual images

from their mathematics to other objects. For example, when a problem called for students to find

the area and perimeter of the trapezoid shown in figure 5-9, the following exchange took place:

Figure 5-9. What does this trapezoid look like?

T: There’s no, no real such shape is there?

Mike: No.

Jenny: There could be.

T: Not in real life, though. Not in real life. (The teacher walks away from

the board.)

Larry: Actually, there is. A certain kind of plane – if you put the nose downward

– that’s the shape.

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T: Uh huh.

Marie: It kind of looks like a building.

T: Kind of looks like a building, kind of. Except kind of a funny roof, huh?

(The teacher comes back to the sketch on the board.

Mike: It’s as though they’re still making it.

T: Yeah. It’d be good for snow. It would be bad, it would be bad for the guy

who has to go up and fix the antenna.

Eddie: I think there is a building like that.

T: What do you mean there’s a building like that?

Sarah: It’s going to pop up in a second. (Sarah and several other students are

using their phones to check the internet. One student is using the

computer connected to the interactive white board.)

T: (Pointing toward something coming up on the interactive white board.)

There’s a little man with fire.

Sarah: Isn’t there a building

T: A building shaped like that? A funny shape for a building isn’t it?

Sarah: It is a shape of a building.

Beth: Yeah, in New York!

T: In New York City, yes. Yeah, what’s the name of it, Beth?

Beth: I don’t know.

Mike: It’s still the roof.

Sarah: The, uh, type in a name, the Citigroup Center.

T: Yeah, it is. The Citigroup Center

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 Jenny: It says it right on top of the page.

T: Well, you knew it was in New York, I thought maybe you knew.

Beth: No, I didn’t. I saw it in New York when I was there.

T: Yeah, yeah. It’s a very unusual building. It’s got a very unusual roof and

looks exactly like this although obviously it’s bigger than 90 centimeters

tall.

In this episode, as in others, students seek real world examples which match the shape of

mathematical objects, seeming to take their quest very seriously.

In another incident, the teacher draws an oval around a set of clustered data and identifies

it as a pickle. Students object to the characterization, stating that it looks more like a lemon or a

football. Contextualization of this nature suggests that students see some connection between

mathematics and real-world objects but does not seem to provide evidence that students are

actually making any mathematical connections beyond identifying potentially similar geometric

shapes. This type of contextualizing accounts for approximately one-third of the coded incidents

in which students sought connections between mathematics and real-world contexts.

Most of the other episodes of contextualizing were incidents in which students were

talking about or questioning how a particular mathematical idea or conclusion applied in a real

world context. In two episodes students suggested ways to model a mathematical conclusion.

For example, when the best fit line of a data plot of class members’ arm span versus height

showed that the quantities were approximately equal, one student volunteers to demonstrate the

relationship.

T: The longer my wingspan, the taller I am. Is that true?

Rob: But it’s supposed to be the same.

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 Jenny: That’s the same as your height. (Other students voice agreement.)

T: You’re right. And you know that. This (he holds his arms straight out to

the side) is how tall I am.

Joanne: I’m off by a little bit.

T: Yeah, we’re all off by a little bit but this (he wiggles his hands) is how tall

I am. That’s how tall Jenny is. That’s how tall Sarah is.

Jenny: Ready, we can do it.

T: (Teacher points at individual students.) That’s how tall you are. That’s

how tall you are.

Jenny: Ready, watch this. Joanne, come on. Can we show them? (Jenny starts

towards the front of the room.)

Jenny: See, go like this (She extends her hands to her sides.) and go like this. (She

bends sideways with arms still extended and touches one hand to the

floor.) Can you put your hand … (The teacher places his hand at the tip of

her extended fingers. Jenny stands back up and moves so that she is

standing directly under the teacher’s hand.) (See figure 5-10.)

T: It really does work. (Several other students come to the front of the room

to try it.)

Figure 5-10. Demonstrating height equals wingspan.

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 Three other incidents involved students stating interpretations of mathematical

representations in terms of real-world contexts. For example, after the class has created a data

plot of class members’ hand span versus their height, the teacher asks if there is a relationship. A

student replies, “The taller you are, the bigger hands you have.” The remaining 11 incidents in

which students consider how mathematical ideas and conclusions apply in real-world contexts

seem to require students to go beyond just visual connections of how to model or directly

interpreting representations. In these incidents students often extend the mathematical ideas and

try to reason about how they might apply. For example, when the class creates a bell-shaped

curve to represent the distribution of heights across a human population and discusses how that is

related to the fact that this particularly tall teacher cannot buy pants at a local store, one student

remarks, “I just figured out why they order more of one thing than another – because they use the

average. The business orders more of what customers are ordering.” In another incident, the

teacher has just reiterated the interpretation of a slope of 2 in a graph of height versus hand span

to mean that, “if you gain 2 inches of height, you gain 1 inch of [hand span].” A student puzzles

over whether this means that someone who is 80 inches tall would have a hand span of 40

inches. This incident serves not only to illustrate an incident of a student striving to make

connections from mathematics to real-world contexts but the fact that this process was not

always effortless or without error.

Although there were very few indicators during the fall observations that students looked

for or saw connections between mathematics and real-world contexts, by spring it was an

element in all class discussions. In fact, if real-world connections were not introduced, or were

not persuasive enough for the students, students asked about them. In two instances during the

spring semester students asked the teacher what the practical application was of the mathematics

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that they were studying. One incident, described earlier, was of a student asking about the

practical application of exponents. In another incident a student, after a long class discussion

about the relationship between hand span and height asked, “what is the point of all this?

…We’re in math, like I get that, but just to randomly do something?” Although there may be

times when questions of this nature are used by students more as a way of trying to sidetrack the

teacher than as a genuine request for information, this student’s willingness to engage and the

embedded assurance that he was not objecting to learning the mathematics involved seem to

indicate that the student genuinely expected there to be an connection and was concerned about

knowing that connection.

Interestingly, although students often sought to connect mathematics to real-world

contexts, they very seldom applied or suggested applying mathematics to real-world contexts or

saw the mathematics inherent in real-life situations. There were only three incidents coded as

decontextualizing: two during the fall observations and one during the spring. The two

indicators during the fall observations were both related to the same incident in which the teacher

was using board markers and erasers to illustrate ideas about like terms. When the teacher holds

up the objects and points out that one marker plus two erasers is still just one marker and two

erasers, one student observes, “that’s just like our x and y’s.” Another student remarks, “it’s like

negative and positive.” These two indicators demonstrate that students are attempting to connect

a physical situation to mathematical ideas.

The incident coded as decontextualizing during the spring observations was the only

incident in which a student suggested applying mathematics to a real-life context. Soon after the

class had finished discussing an area problem which required students to find the area of an

object by find the area of a larger figure and subtracting out unused portions of the figure (see

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figure 5-11), a student suggested that they should use a similar process to find the amount of

wasted space in a shipping box.

Figure 5-11. Side view of bridge.

Rob: Wait, Mr. Wingate. We should calculate the area of wasted space that

Apple uses in the boxes when they send you ear buds. ‘Cause they sent

me complimentary ear buds and, no, but I got this box that was like the

size of this desk and I was like, “did they send me a free car with these ear

buds?” And I like opened it and it was bubble wrap. And then below the

bubble wrap was another box and I opened that box and in that box was

bubble wrap. And then, finally, in that box was the white Apple box. But

then inside that box was Styrofoam and then when you broke the

Styrofoam apart, it was finally the ear buds.

T: Wow. How big was the outermost box?

In this incident it appeared that the student was attending the extra “space” subtracted out the

bridge area problem and considering how the same type of mathematical strategy might be used

for a real-world volume problem. The fact that there were so few incidents of decontextualizing

and so many of contextualizing seems to indicate that students in this class expect to see

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mathematics play out and relate to their world but may not have developed a sense of the

usefulness of mathematics as a tool for understanding and analyzing their world.

Students’ comments during the interviews provide some insight into the connections that

students see and expect between mathematical topics and between mathematics and other

contexts. Although there were no conceptions statements intended to elicit information about

these connections, three out the five groups who discussed the statement, “Math is made up of

unrelated topics” interpreted the statement to mean that mathematics was unrelated to real-world

topics or to other school subjects. Of these groups only one agreed with the statement but they

did so because they believed that many different, unrelated topics were connected to

mathematics.

I: Math is made up of unrelated topics.

Jenny: Yes, definitely. Because we use science, we use

Jim: True, we use science

Jenny: We use math for science

Mike: History

Jenny: Or

Jim: Yeah, like for geography

Jenny: Yeah. So, definitely.

I: Okay.

Jenny: So we’ll put it like close to the top. A little bit at the top. (The top for

them was the strongly agree end of the continuum.)

I: Okay.

Students in this group clearly saw mathematics as related to other academic topics.

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 The conception that mathematics is connected to real-world settings also came up for

some groups when discussing other conception statements. For example, one group, in their

discussion about the importance of understanding why a procedure works, had the following

discussion:

I: Anything to add over there?

Larry: Only that if you get everything right, yeah you’ll have a good grade, but if

you try to apply it to, I don’t know, work of something like

Jess: to real life situations

Larry: it’s not going to help.

The students in this group clearly expected that mathematics should be connected to real world

contexts.

During the fall observations of this class there were very few indicators that these

students expected or saw connections between mathematics and real world contexts. However,

by the end of the school year both the number of indicators and the students’ comments during

interviews demonstrate that students had come to conceive of mathematics as sensible enough

that is should be connected to real world contexts.

Summary

Students in this class saw and expected connections between mathematical topics and

between mathematics and real world contexts. Although there were some indicators of this

conception during the fall observation, there were more than triple the number of such indicators

during the spring observations. During the spring observations such indicators were present

during every class period and were a part of every class discussion. It seems likely that the

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conception of mathematics as sensible enough that mathematics should be connected both

internally and to other contexts grew substantially over the course of this academic year.

Findings related to strategizing

Students in this class conceived of mathematics as sensible enough that they strategized

about mathematics; seeking and offering alternate solutions to mathematics problems and talking

about strategies for approaching problems for which they had no ready procedure. Overall, their

actions with regard to engaging in strategizing in mathematics were supported by their

discussion of conceptions statements although there is still some question about the role that

these students believe memory plays in doing mathematics.

Types of evidence

There were, initially, five indicators for coding students’ engagement in strategizing.

Two of these indicators, “Strategize about solution methods” and “Discuss how to solve

problems rather than seeking the ‘right steps’” were found to be almost impossible to separate

both in coding and in analysis of incidents. They were, thus, combined into a single strategizing

indicator. Two other indicators in this category, “Use poor memory as a reason why they cannot

do a problem” and “rely on memory of procedures for problem solving” were two of only three

negative indicators in the framework. They were included both because of their prominence in

the literature and because of their presence in the pilot data for this study. The fifth indicator

was “Seek and use alternative solution strategies.”

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 There were four conceptions statements related to strategizing on which students were

asked to comment. Two were related to the role of memory in doing mathematics: “Math is

memorizing and applying definitions, formulas, facts, and procedures” (Grigutsch & Torner,

1998) and “You don’t have to have a good memory to be good at math.” One statement, “A

math problem can always be solved in different ways” (Brown et al., 1988) was designed to get

students to discuss the role of alternative solution strategies in mathematics. The fourth

statement, “There is always a rule to follow in solving math problems” (Telese, 1999; Brown et

al., 1988) was intended to provide students with an opportunity to discuss the role of strategizing

when solving problems rather than simply following procedural rules.

Strategizing when problem solving

Students in this class engaged in strategizing during both the fall and the spring

observation periods. However, it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between coding for this

indicator and coding for the indicator, explain how from the expect explanations category of the

framework. The decision between the two codes was made based on an assessment of the timing

of the students’ action, the specificity of students’ discussion of the problem, and the students’

likely intent. If the indicator came before actual solving of the problem, it seems clear that the

students was strategizing about how to solve the problem rather than explaining how he or she

had already solved it. This accounts for most of the incidents coded as strategizing. However,

even if the student was in the midst of solving or had already solved the problem, statements

which seemed to generalize the solution method were coded as strategizing since they were

designed to provide a strategy for approaching problems of this type. For example, in one

instance students were working independently to find the equation of a line given two ordered

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pairs. After a student found the equation she summarized the process for another student saying,

“Okay, so this number, that is always going to be your x and then, once you take that, or times

that times that, that’s your b, so we stop there.” Although the student is talking about she solved

a particular problem, she generalizes the result into a strategy for working problems of the same

type. Similarly, even specific statements about how a student had already solved a problem were

coded as strategizing if the context was one in which a general strategize was expected. The

following incident illustrates this.

T: How do we simplify something like 39/65? Do we have a strategy for

doing it? … What’s your strategy Joanne?

Joanne: Well, I added 9 and 3 and then …

Joanne goes on to explain how she did this particular problem. However, since the call was for a

general strategy and both the teacher and the class treat Joanne’s explanation as general, it was

coded as strategizing.

Using these coding guidelines, there were 16 coded instances of strategizing during the

fall observation and 25 during the spring. In addition to the more than 50% increase in the

number of incidents from fall to spring, there was a distinct difference in the role that prompting

seemed to play in students’ engagement in strategizing. During the fall observations six of the

16 incidents of strategizing were directly prompted by the teacher. One such incident took place

when the class was discussing how to identify which two sides of a right triangle should be used

when finding the area. As a group they had already determined that they should begin by finding

the area of the related rectangle by multiplying length times width. The teacher then asks, “How

do I know that I am looking at the length and width and not some other line?” A student

strategizes, “If I make an L and line it up and make the length times the width.” Here the teacher

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has asked for and received a general strategy. Two other incidents during the fall observation

were prompted not by the teacher by other students. Both took place as students were working

on problems involving ordering a series of fractions from smallest to largest. Several students

asked their peers how to approach the problem. One student suggested converting the factions

into decimals. Another volunteered that she would start by putting the fractions into a reasonable

order and then checking the order by checking each pair. Altogether, half of all incidents of

strategizing during the fall observation were prompted by either the teacher or by other students.

During the spring observation, of the 25 episodes of strategizing, only four had any evident

prompting, all by the teacher. Both the increase in number of coded episodes of strategizing and

the changing role of prompting seem to indicate that the students in this class have grown in their

conception of mathematics as something sensible enough that strategizing is a useful tool.

Students’ reactions to the conceptions statement designed to address the role of

strategizing in problem solving, “there is always a rule to follow when solving math problems”

(Telese, 1999; Brown et al., 1988), present a complex picture of their conceptions about

mathematics. For two of the groups of students, this statement provided little evidence about

their conceptions of strategizing because they used the statement to talk more about the role that

rules play in the structure of mathematics than the role of rules in problem solving. Both of these

groups agreed with the statement and based their agreement on the importance of general rules

such as the order of operations. The following conversation serves as an example:

Beth: You can’t just randomly look at the problem and do what you want. It’s

like order of operations,

Rob: Yeah

Beth: you have to do it the right way

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 Rob: SADMEP. (He laughs. Note that SADMEP is the acronym for order of

operations, PEMDAS, spelled backwards.)

Beth: or else your answer will be messed up.

The other four groups of students all agreed with the statement and several described a rule-

bound way of engaging in mathematics that seems at odds with the strategizing observed in the

classroom. One group was particularly articulate about this conception:

I: There is always a rule to follow in solving math problems.

Rachel: Yeah.

Sarah: Yes, you always have to follow…

Rachel: You have to follow the rules or else you are going to get it wrong.

Sarah: Yeah, there’s always a different way, ’cause different problems have

different rules to solve them. Unless you do the same rules for the same

problems you’re not going to get the same answer. It’s going to be

completely different. [The girls work together to place the card towards

the agree end of the continuum.] And it’s completely different math –

completely different math problems that, um, need different rules. I just

said the same thing three times.

I: That’s okay. Sometimes you have to say it a couple of times to make sure

you said it well.

The idea that there are rules for each problem seems to contradict the tendency of the

students in this class to engage in strategizing about problem solving. Such a contradiction may

provide further evidence that the conception of mathematics as sensible enough to strategize

about may be a new, developing conception for students; one that they have begun to enact but

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have not yet internalized as true. It may also indicate that it is a conception of mathematics that

they see modeled in their mathematics class but may not have heard articulated.

Alternative strategies

Students in this class look for and use alternative strategies in problem solving even

though they are never prompted to do so. This practice is far more in evidence during the spring

observations than during the fall observations. During the fall observation, there were four

incidents in which students offered alternative solution strategies. All four of these were offered

in the context of simplifying or performing basic operations on fractions. For example, when the

class is working together to reduce the fraction 84/96, they divide both the numerator and

denominator by 2 several times and then divide each by 3. A student suggests that they could

have simply divided both by 12 instead.

During the spring observations there were 11 incidents in which students suggested or

talked about their use of alternative strategies. Unlike the incidents from the fall observations,

these incidents covered a number of different mathematical topics including finding the

perimeter of a rectangle, calculating the slope of a line, solving linear equations, solving

problems involving percents, and simplifying expressions containing exponents. About half of

the alternative solution strategies proposed by students during the spring observation were

similar in character to the fall incidents in that they involved simply proposing an alternative

procedure for solving a problem. These included incidents like recognizing that one can talk

about the slope of a given line as either going down 4 and right 3 or going up 4 and left 3 and

 
questioning whether it is easier, in the case of simplifying the expression
 , to first


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simplify the fraction within the parentheses or to deal with the exponent outside the parentheses

first. The rest of the incidents from the spring observations in which students proposed alternate

solution methods went beyond just looking at alternative procedures. They involved students

actually looking at problem contexts from a different perspective. For example, students were

discussing how to solve the problem: Bill’s car has four tires. One of them is flat. What percent

is that? Most students seemed to use a process similar to the one articulated by the student intern

leading the lesson. She explained, “So because there’s four tires, if one of them is only flat, then

you put one over four and then when you find that percent that comes to .25 and you do .25 times

100 and you have 25%. However, one student interjected with, “I figured out the percent of

what’s left… I did 75% subtracted from 100%.” This student’s alternative strategy involved a

new way of considering the original problem context. Another example occurred when the class

was working to find the area of the shape shown in figure 5-12.

Figure 5-12. Area of concave hexagon.

One student, in conjunction with the student intern, had already presented a solution

based on finding the area of the entire rectangle and subtracting the area of the small triangle.

Two other students proposed alternative solutions. One suggested dissecting the figure as shown

by the dotted line in figure 5-13.

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Figure 5-13. An alternative dissection of the concave hexagon.

The other student proposed the dissection shown in figure 5-14.

Figure 5-14. A second alternative dissection of the concave hexagon.

These alternative solutions went beyond looking at alternative procedures to seeking new

ways to approach the problem. Although students readily offered alternative solutions to

problems during both the spring and fall observations, both the number of incidents and the

richness of the type of alternatives offered was substantially higher during the spring

observation.

Students’ readiness to offer alternative solutions matched well with what they said in

interviews. When asked about their level of agreement with the statement, “There is always

more than one way to solve a math problem” (Brown et al., 1988) all groups expressed some

level of agreement. One group placed the statement towards the agree side of the middle of the

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agree/disagree continuum because they were not convinced that there was always more than one

way.

I: A math problem can always be solved in different ways.

Larry: I guess I can mostly agree with that. [He places the card about two- thirds

towards agree.]

I: Okay, why?

Larry: Because, in some cases, it can, but in others it can’t. It depends on the

situation, I guess.

I: Okay. Can you think of something that there’s only one way to do?

Larry: Dividing fractions.

Jenny: Dividing fractions, not yet

Larry: Not yet, why?

Jenny: No, not, I’m sure there’s more than one way for that

Jenny: I don’t know. Like adding there’s only one way to add.

I: Okay.

Two groups placed the statement close to strongly agree but did not place it all the way to

strongly agree because, although they agreed that there was more than one way to solve all of the

mathematical problems that they had encountered so far, they did not want to speculate about its

truth for all mathematics. Jenny’s and Jim’s comments were representative of the remarks made

by these groups.

I: A math problem can always be solved in different ways.

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Jenny: Not necessarily.

Jim: Well, kind of, because there’s other ways to do, like, most of the math

stuff that we do there’s

Mike: Two ways

Jim: A lot, yeah there’s a lot, like Florida to Washington, and then like the

other way (Jim is referring to two different procedures for adding and

subtracting fractions.)

Jenny: Yeah.

Mike: I, that’s like as far that way as you can go.

Jim: I don’t, I think it’s like around here (pointing toward a place closer to the

¾ mark of the continuum.) ‘cause we could

Mike: Like about here?

Jim : Yeah, ‘cause we can

Jenny: ‘Cause we don’t know, we’re not in other math classes right now so we

don’t, necessarily, know.

I: So you’re really talking about the “always”? It might not always, so

Mike: Yeah.

Jim: Like, sometimes.

I: Okay. Would you go with sometimes or usually?

Jenny: Probably usually.

Jim: Usually.

I: Okay.

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 The other groups expressed strong agreement with the statement. One group was initially

hesitant but then, by giving an example of solving a problem in different ways, seemed to talk

themselves into agreeing with the statement.

I: A math problem can always be solved in different ways.

Rachel: Well, that depends on what you are doing.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, it depends on, basically, being solved in different ways just

means like getting the answer in different ways. Like with the combining,

not the combining, with the, uh, what is it, two step equations, you can

solve it two different ways. You can either subtract the x’s first or you can

subtract the regular numbers first.

I: Okay.

Sarah: So that’s two different ways.

Rachel: Or you can graph, first

Sarah: Or do like the math

Rachel: or do the algebra first

I: Okay.

Sarah: That’s like a, yeah [Sarah places the card towards the strongly agree end

of the continuum.]

This same group also identified this conception statement as one that they would not have

agreed with as much before this school year. They discussed the fact that last year they were

expected to learn and use only one way to solve any particular problem.

Sarah: I think that one would be toward, more towards the middle for me.

I: Oh, math problems can always be solved in different ways.

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 Rachel: Like, last year that would be more towards the end for me more.

I: Towards which end?

Rachel: This end. [She points to the strongly disagree end.]

I: Okay.

Rachel: Because she taught

I: So both of you would agree with that less?

Sarah: She only taught us one and she said don’t worry about any other ways

because you’re just going to get confused…. You had to do it her way.

That’s so frustrating.

The change in the number and type of alternative solutions offered by students between

the fall and the spring observation coupled with Sarah’s expression of frustration at not being

encouraged to use other solution methods seem to indicate that students did begin this school

year with a conception that mathematics is sensible enough that one can and should be allowed

to use alternative solution strategies. However, the change in both the number and type of

alternative strategies between the fall and spring observations suggest that this, too, is an area in

which students have grown in their conception of mathematics as sensible.

Role of memory in mathematics

Students in this class provided mixed and sometimes contradictory evidence about their

conception of mathematics as sensible enough that problem solving does not rely on memory.

Because of its prominence in the literature on conceptions of mathematics, there were two

conceptions statements and two indicators related to the role that memory, as opposed to

strategizing, plays in mathematics. In sorting the conceptions, students within groups often

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disagreed on their placement of both “You don’t have to have a good memory to be good at

math” and “Math is about memorizing and applying formulas, definitions, and procedures”

(Grigutsch & Torner, 1998). Even after discussion, students in three out of the six groups could

not resolve their conflicting opinions about their levels of agreement with the statement “You

don’t need a good memory to be good at math.” For example, in one group of three students I

tore the card into three pieces and allowed each student to place a piece. The pieces were placed

at 1.5, 7.5, and 8.8 on a 10 point scale. When students were asked at the end of the interview if

there were any statements that they wanted to revisit in order to reconsider the placement, the

statements about memory were revisited far more than any other statements with three out of the

six groups going back to the card about needing a good memory.

Of the 12 students involved in the interviews, seven strongly disagreed with the statement

“You don’t need a good memory to be good at math.” Some of the students who disagreed did

so because they took the statement to extremes. They seemed to interpret the card as meaning

that you can be successful doing mathematics with no memory at all. As one student stated,

“…if you don’t remember what you did yesterday, how are you going to keep up with it?” Other

students who disagreed seem to interpret the statement as being about the helpfulness of a good

memory as opposed to the need for one. One students stated, “I think I strongly disagree with

that because you have to be able to, you don’t have to be able to, but it’s, I guess I think it’s

easier to have, like, to remember things you’ve learned to use in the future in math.” Although

more than half of the students talked about the importance of memory for doing mathematics,

none of these students insisted that a good memory was essential or that memory was a central

part of what it means to engage in doing mathematics.

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 There were only two students in the interviews who expressed strong agreement with the

statement, “You don’t need a good memory to be good at math.” The other three students rated

the statement somewhere in the middle of the continuum. The kinds of rationale provided by

students who agreed and those who were in the middle were very similar. Most talked about the

helpfulness of memory and the importance of remembering some things but also discussed the

ways that reasoning and practice balanced out the need to remember everything. One student

reported:

Jenny: Well, I don’t know, I feel like you don’t need the best memory to do math

because you keep on practicing and practicing so I think you just know it.

You don’t necessarily need to remember every single step because – I

have a good memory but I know sometimes I forget what I’m doing in

math but I didn’t already do it –[inaudible] understand it.

Although the audio recording is unclear, it appears that Jenny is discussing not only the role of

practice but the role that understanding mathematics may play in alleviating the need to

remember everything in mathematics. Jerry makes this point more clearly in his comment,

“…even if you sometimes don’t have the greatest memory, you can’t remember things but you

can still figure them out by writing them out and you can just have a different thought

processes…” As with the students who disagreed with the statement that you don’t need a good

memory to do mathematics, of students who agreed there were none that gave the statement a

whole-hearted, unqualified endorsement. The closest any student came was the student who

responded to the statement “Math is memorizing and applying formulas, definitions and

procedures” (Grigutsch & Torner, 1998) by stating, “Not really, because it’s mostly about

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problem solving and figuring stuff out. So it’s not, so it’s not, I mean memorize as you go but

it’s not directly as memorizing.”

Overall, students’ statements in interviews indicate that they tend to see an important role

for memory in the doing of mathematics although they also recognize the importance of

“problem solving and figuring stuff out.” Interestingly, there was no evidence of this role of

memory in their classroom work or discussion. There were no incidents during either the fall or

the spring observations in which students used poor memory as an excuse for not engaging with

a problem or talked about needing to remember a procedure. In fact, in the 4 weeks of classroom

observation there were no episodes in which students discussed memory or referred to the need

to remember anything in mathematics. The all-too-familiar refrains in many mathematics classes

of “I don’t remember how to …,” “I’ll never be able to remember that,” or “Do you remember

how to …” were conspicuously absent both during whole class discussion and when students

were working in small groups. The students’ classroom behavior would indicate that they see

mathematics as sensible enough that it can and should be reasoned about rather than needing to

be remembered. The fact that this behavior was consistent from the very start of the school year

also indicates that this may be a conception that was in place before this academic year.

The seeming contradiction between what students said about the role of memory in

mathematics and their classroom actions is difficult to explain. Some of the contradiction might

be explained by some of their extreme interpretations of the conceptions statements. There may

also be other factors at work such as norms of behavior from previous mathematics classes.

Unfortunately, there is insufficient data to make any reasonable speculation about this seeming

contradiction. What is evident is that students, in practice, conceive of mathematics as sensible

enough that they engage in strategizing rather than relying on memory. It is also likely, given

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the consistent nature of students’ classroom actions, that this conception was in place from the

beginning of the academic year.

Summary

Students in this class see mathematics as sensible enough that they can and do strategize

about problem solving and seek alternative problem solving strategies. The students’ statements

during interviews reinforce this assertion. The increase in the number of episodes in which

students engage in these behaviors and the way they talk about strategizing may indicate that

strategizing is a category in which their conceptions of mathematics have grown over the

academic year.

Findings related to mathematical authority

Students in this class conceive of mathematics as sensible enough that they sometimes

assume mathematical authority and that they accept mathematical facts as authoritative.

However, this practice is not common and there are times when the students cede mathematical

authority to the teacher.

Types of evidence

There were initially five indicators related to mathematical authority. Four of these

indicators were related to students assuming mathematical authority: willingness to attempt

unfamiliar problems, checking their own answers to problems, inventing mathematics problems,

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and engaging in 2-way conversations about mathematics. The fifth indicator, seeking to be told

whether an answer is correct, related to ceding mathematical and was one of only three negative

indicators used in the framework. It was incorporated because of its prevalence in the literature.

Two additional indicators were added to this category during data analysis. The first, addressing

possible mathematical misconceptions of other students, is related to assuming mathematical

authority. The second, seeing mathematics as authoritative, is not directly related to either

assuming or ceding mathematical authority.

There was one conceptions statement related to mathematical authority: “You can’t tell

whether or not an answer is correct until someone tells you.” Although this statement could have

led to discussion about assuming authority, ceding authority to an outside source like the teacher,

or mathematics as authoritative, all of the discussion revolved around assuming mathematical

authority.

Assuming authority

Most of the coded indicators and all of the students’ comments during interviews were

related to students assuming mathematical authority. There were four episodes related to

assumption of authority during the fall observations and eight during the spring.

One episode during the fall and one during the spring were of students checking their

own answers rather than seeking to have the teacher or other outside authority check them. In

one case a student has an answer different from that of another student and decides to go with her

original answer because, “it makes more sense.” In the other episode a student rejects her initial

calculation for the slope of line seemingly because it is far larger than expected. She states that

she got “4500 over 7. I think that’s wrong.”

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 The lack of indicators that students are routinely checking their own answers or are

checking them by rigorous means is at odds with what students said in interviews about checking

answers. When asked about their level of agreement with the statement, “You can’t tell whether

or not an answer is correct until someone tells you” all but two of the students disagreed. The

comments from those who disagreed ranged from:

I kind of strongly disagree on this one because there’s… a lot of ways to figure out a

problem and if you get the same answer more than twice for a problem you don’t know

then you can be right. The possibility, your chances of being right are greater. …So I

disagree that… because there are many ways to figure it out and if you come up with the

answer, you know, more than once or twice it’s, it should be right – most of the time.

to a very adamant, “Wrong! Liar!” The one student who placed the statement near the

middle identified several possible ways to check your own answer but then stated that, “like a

teacher or like an assistant teacher, they can check the math to make sure you’re right. It’s

always good to double check.” He went on to state that, “I’m not really confident in math, that’s

why I’m processing it more.” I presume that by processing it more he is referring to thinking

more about his rating of this statement than the other members of his group. The only student

who completely disagreed with the statement was a student who was not interviewed as part of a

group and tends to speak very little. He placed the card on the agree end of the continuum and

did not comment.

There were two episodes during the fall observations in which students identified and

pointed out potential mathematical misconceptions of their peers. In the first a student appeared

to be confused when the teacher talked about thirty-five hundred miles. Another student

interjected, “That’s another way of saying three thousand five hundred. Don’t get confused by

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that.” In another incident some students suggest cross-multiplying to multiply fractions. A

student tells them that they are probably confusing multiplication with division. These two

incidents seem to illustrate students taking responsibility for the mathematics in their classroom.

Because of these two incidents an indicator was added to the assume authority category for

addressing mathematical misconceptions of peers.

Although several of the indicators for assuming authority were fairly consistent across the

fall and spring observations, there were two indicators in which there seemed to be some growth

over the academic year. During the fall semester there was only one incident in which a student

posed his own mathematics problem. During the spring semester there were four episodes. In

the fall episode, the teacher has been discussing the cost of new textbooks and tells the students

the cost of the new calculus textbooks and the number of students in the class. When the teacher

asks students about the total cost, one student has already formulated and solved the problem.

He calls out, “I just did it” and gives the correct solution. In a similar episode during the spring

observations one student, trying to make sense of the statement that “if you gain 2 inches of

height, you gain 1 inch of [hand span],” wonders whether this means that someone who is 80

inches tall would have a hand span of 40 inches. Several students respond that it does not work

that way and a pair of students in the back of the room begins to work independently to find the

correct anticipated hand span of a person 80 inches tall. Although the teacher soon begins

working the same problem at the board, the audio recording makes it clear that these students

have formulated and begun solving the problem on their own.

In addition to an increased willingness to pose their own mathematical problems, during

the spring observation there are several incidents in which students display a willingness to

engage in a problem for which they have not yet learned a procedure. This tendency is not

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evident during the fall observations but occurs on three occasions during the spring observations.

One example of this is when the teacher writes the expression x-2 on the board and asks students

to speculate on its possible meaning. Suggestions include: “you have negative two x’s,” “you

have negative two dollars,” and “negative x times negative x, so two negatives is a positive.” In

another incident the teacher writes the sequence 1,1,2,3,5,_,_ on the board and asks students

what numbers come next. The students have had no recent experience with problems of this type

and have not been given strategies to engage in problems like this; however, they try the problem

anyway.

Both the increase in problem-posing behavior and the increased tendency to engage in

unfamiliar problems may indicate that students are assuming more mathematical authority but

the small number of incidents for any of the indicators relating to assuming authority does not

provide enough evidence for a strong claim. The strongest evidence that students do assume

some authority is their statements during interviews about their lack of a need for someone to tell

them whether and answer is correct.

Ceding authority

The initial framework of indicators included one negative indicator in the category of

assuming authority: seeking to be told whether or not an answer is correct. There were two

episodes in the data coded with this indicator, one during the spring observations and one during

the fall observations. Both episodes included several coded indicators in which students,

working independently on a practice worksheet, asked the teacher or one of the other adults in

the classroom if an answer was correct. While this may be seen as evidence that students are

ceding mathematical authority, in both cases students were working on practice exercises related

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to a topic that was new to them. During the fall observation, students were simplifying

expressions by using the distributive property and combining like terms. During the spring

observation they were simplifying expressions involving negative exponents. In addition to

being new, these types of exercises are very difficult to check except by redoing the problem.

During these same episodes students were also checking answers with other students and seeking

to reconcile different answers. With this as the only evidence of students ceding authority, I am

reluctant to draw any conclusions about students not seeing mathematics as sensible enough that

they need to rely on an outside authority for confirmation of their answers.

Mathematics as authoritative

There was incident during the fall semester in which it appeared that a student granted

authority neither to the teacher nor to himself but, rather, to the mathematics.

T: In 1896, the state legislature in Indiana introduced a bill that said pi, from

now on, in the State in Indiana, will be 3. Not 3.1415926598. 3. For the

benefit of all school children who will now have an easier calculation to

do.

Mike: Cool.

Beth: Okay.

Rob: But –

T: But?

Rob: But that’s not accurate to the rest of the world so when they leave their

little bubble of 3

Beth: I get it

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 Rob: they wouldn’t know what they are doing.

T: You’re exactly right, Rob, and, in the end, the bill didn’t pass because

mathematicians went to the state capital and said, “Look, this is not how

the world works.” And so, in the end, the bill didn’t pass.

In this episode, Rob’s objection demonstrates that he recognizes that the mathematics of the

situation is authoritative. This is an incident clearly related to mathematical authority but

unrelated to any of the original indicators. It also seems closely related to a view of mathematics

as sensible enough that it should be internally consistent. It was coded as seeing mathematics as

authoritative. As a single incident, it tells us very little about the students in the class and their

conception of mathematics. It may, however, have value as another indicator in the framework

that students see mathematics as sensible.

Summary

There is some evidence that students in this class see mathematics as sensible enough that

they can assume mathematical authority and see mathematics as authoritative. Students, in

interviews, agree that they have sufficient mathematical authority they do not need to be told

when an answer is correct. However, there are too few classroom indicators to make reasonable

conjectures about students’ conceptions about authority in mathematics or about the possible

growth of that conception over the academic year.

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 Findings related to stating that mathematics makes sense

In the framework there is one indicator relating to students stating that mathematics

makes sense: expressing a role for common sense in mathematics. This indicator was developed

from the literature on students’ conceptions of mathematics. It might look something like a

student, after being introduced to the formula for finding the slope of line given two points,

stating, “Oh, it makes sense that you would subtract the y’s because that tells you the rise.”

There were no incidents of this nature in the data from either the spring or the fall observations.

There were also no conceptions statements related to this indicator. Although students in this

classroom gave many indicators that they conceived of mathematics as sensible they do not state

this.

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 Chapter 6 Discussion

In this chapter I discuss important results from this study. I first discuss answers to the

research questions posed in Chapter 1. I then discuss the significance of the study and the ways

in which the framework evolved over the course of the study. I conclude the chapter by

discussing the implications of the study and making suggestions for further research.

Assertions based on findings

Research question 1

The first research question for this study was related to the use of constructs in the

existing literature that might be used to develop observable, action-oriented indicators that

students in a mathematics classroom see mathematics as sensible. Survey and interview

questions from the current studies on students’ conceptions of mathematics provided questions

and statements that I was able to reframe into observable, action-oriented indicators. While the

list of indicators gleaned from the literature proved not to be an exhaustive list of possible

indicators, the indicators grouped into five main categories. These categories were found to be

adequate for coding all observed behavior in which students seemed to indicate that they saw

mathematics as sensible. Thus, specific behaviors not covered by the list of indicators could be

coded with a more general designation of strategizing, expecting connections, expecting

explanations, assuming authority, or stating. Constructs from the current literature were

sufficient to permit construction of a useable framework for coding indicators that students in a

secondary mathematics classroom conceived of mathematics as sensible.

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Research question 2

The second research question for this study was: In what ways is the framework a viable

tool for documenting students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible? The framework of

indicators developed in the first part of the study evolved during data collection and analysis into

a robust, useful, and flexible tool for identifying indicators that students conceived of

mathematics as sensible. The initial framework, by permitting coding by category rather than by

specific indicator when needed, provided the flexibility to code indicators not specified in the

original list of indicators. Further categorization of indicators into more general types provided

the necessary step to make the framework one that is useful not only for coding student actions

but for gaining an overall picture of the dimensions and details of the ways in which students see

mathematics as sensible.

Significance of the study

The importance of understanding students’ conceptions of mathematics and the

limitations of both surveys and interviews for assessing those conceptions, points to a need for a

tool that permits inference of those conceptions from students’ actions. The framework

developed in this study, by providing action-oriented indicators that students see mathematics as

sensible, is such a tool. Furthermore, with its categorization of different aspects of this

conception of mathematics, this framework can be used to study students’ conceptions of

mathematics as sensible along several different dimensions.

This study provides one of the few frameworks designed to examine student actions in

the classroom. There are a number of observational frameworks or protocols designed to look at

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teacher actions or classroom traits (e. g. Grouws et al., 2013; Piburn & Sawada, 2000). Going

back to Lampert’s problem spaces of teaching and learning, most work has focused attention on

the problem space between teacher and student. This framework provides a tool for examining

the problem space between the student and content, in this case students’ conception of

mathematics as sensible.

6-1 The work of teaching (Lampert, 2001, p. 33)

This framework is, to my knowledge, the first to be established that provides a way to

assess productive disposition as indicated by students’ actions. Most previous research on

students’ conceptions of mathematics has relied on students’ self-reports of their conceptions.

This framework, by providing a tool for using students’ actions to examine conceptions, provides

a tool that is not subject to the limitations of self-reporting (Munby, 1982).

This framework is also the first to bring together several critical student practices.

Strategizing, seeking connections, assuming mathematical authority, and explaining are all

prominent in the literature on mathematics education. They are central to the Standards for

Mathematical Practice of the CCSS-M (NGA & CCSSO, 2010), the NCTM Practice Standards

(NCTM, 2000), and the strands of mathematical disposition (NRC, 2001). This study, by

beginning with the literature on students’ conceptions of mathematics and identifying each of

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these practices in that literature, brings these practices together and links each to students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible.

Beyond contributing to the literature as described above, this framework links research

and practice, most notably by providing a tool that teachers and students can use in multiple

ways. This study provides a new tool to help teachers, teacher educators, and researchers better

understand students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible. By using action-oriented

indicators based in the existing literature, it is helpful for identifying episodes in which students

give evidence of a conception of mathematics as sensible. By organizing these indicators into

categories and subcategories, the SCOMAS framework provides a multifaceted vision of

students’ conceptions and provides a framework with the flexibility to move beyond the specific

indicators from the literature and include other actions that fit within the framework’s categories.

For example, this framework may be helpful for teachers as a tool to examine the

conceptions of their students. They could, as was done in this study, use it to code video

recordings of their classroom. From this they can see the types of activities indicative of a

conception of mathematics as sensible in which their students do and do not engage. A teacher

might find, for example, that her students regularly engage in making connections, strategizing,

and explaining how they solved problems but that they do not tend to engage in explaining why

mathematical statements are true or why they employed certain strategies. The teacher might

then seek to help students develop more in the weaker areas.

The SCOMAS framework could also be useful to teachers as they examine their own

instructional practices. There is not yet strong evidence that encouraging students to engage in

the actions used as indicators in the framework helps to change students’ conceptions of

mathematics. However, it is reasonable to expect that more frequent engagement in these actions

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will help students see that these actions are a part of doing mathematics and, thus, that

mathematics is sensible enough that such actions are productive.

Teachers may also be able to use this framework as a springboard toward instructional

practices that allow for the kind of more “open mathematics” envisioned by Jo Boaler (1998).

The lack of coded indicators in some of the classes used in the pilot study may be less indicative

of students’ conceptions of mathematics in those classes than of instructional practices that do

not provide opportunities for students to engage in the kind of actions named in the framework.

Teachers, in using the framework to examine their students’ conceptions, may better be able to

visualize the kinds of actions in which students might engage and seek opportunities to engage

students in more open mathematics.

Teachers may also be able to use the SCOMAS framework with secondary school

students. The framework could help students visualize the types of activity that are a part of

engaging in mathematics as a sense-making enterprise. Students could use the framework to

examine the specific actions in which they or the class have engaged and could use the

framework as a way to measure their own development in the different categories. The

framework could provide a way for teachers and students to engage in discussion about what

mathematical activity could look like and make teachers and students co-architects of a new way

of engaging in mathematics in the classroom.

In addition to linking research and practice for teachers and students, the SCOMAS

framework could be useful to teacher educators as they work with preservice mathematics

teachers. A common challenge for pre-service teachers is how to reflect on student learning,

particularly for a strand of mathematical proficiency as difficult to measure by pencil and paper

test as productive disposition. This framework provides a tool that preservice teachers could use

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in observing mathematics classrooms and examining video of their own teaching. In addition to

providing pre-service teachers with a tool for reflecting on student learning this framework, with

its action-oriented indicators, may provide pre-service teachers with a vision of the types of

behaviors in which students might be expected to engage in a mathematics classroom focused on

sense-making.

Teacher educators and others who mentor teachers may find this framework a helpful

tool to use for observing teachers. The specific nature of the indicators in the framework makes

it easy to identify actions through which students give evidence that they see mathematics as

sensible. Meanwhile, the categories within the framework provide a way that teacher educators

and mentors can help teachers reflect on the ways in which classroom instruction may provide or

limit opportunities for students to engage in these actions.

This study and the resulting framework make an important contribution to the field of

mathematics education research. In 2001, the five strands of mathematical proficiency

envisioned by the National Research Council provided a new vision for a multifaceted

knowledge of mathematics. These strands also formed the foundation for the Standards for

Mathematical Practice of the CCSS-M. However, there is still much work to be done on

operationalizing the concepts introduced in these strands. This study looks closely at a central

part of the strand of productive disposition, “the habitual inclination to see mathematics as

sensible…” (National Research Council, 2001, p. 5) and provides action-based indicators and a

categorized framework for examining this concept. The SCOMAS framework provides

researchers with a tool for examining students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible within

several different categories. It could be used to examine changes in students’ conceptions over

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time and as a way of examining effectiveness of instruction in helping to develop students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible.

Finally, although not intended as an outcome of the study, this study serves as an

existence proof that even students who have struggled in mathematics can develop productive

dispositions towards mathematics. The vision put forth in Adding It Up (NRC, 2001) is that all

children become proficient in all strands. Despite the importance of productive disposition for

all students there has been little research on its development in students who have struggled with

learning mathematics. The high school students involved in this study all had a history of low

achievement in mathematics and many had learning disabilities in mathematics. The indicators

of a conception of mathematics as sensible displayed by this group of students provides an

existence proof that development of a productive disposition is achievable by a broad spectrum

of students.

Evolution of the framework

Given the careful design of the research and development process, as explained in this

document, I am confident that my final framework both represents action-oriented indicators of

productive disposition and that the framework can be used as a useful tool for documenting

evidence of productive disposition in mathematics classrooms. In the following paragraphs I

describe how the framework evolved through its use in analyzing classroom data. I first describe

changes in the indicators, then changes in the structure of the framework.

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Changes to the indicators

The first step in this process of creating a more flexible, robust framework was to identify

necessary changes to the initial list of indicators. This began with the elimination of the three

negative indicators in the framework: relying on memory for problem solving, using poor

memory as a reason for not being able to solve problems, and seeking to be told whether an

answer is correct. Initially the prevalence of these items in the existing literature led me to

include them in the list of indicators, despite the fact that they were negative indicators rather

than positive ones. However, once indicators were organized into a framework, it became clear

that other items within the same category were already coding the opposite of these negative

indicators. For example, the opposite of relying on memory for problem solving is to engage in

some form of strategizing when confronted with an unknown problem. The opposite of seeking

to be told whether an answer is correct is to try to check one’s own work. Given that the positive

indicators for the same situations were already in the framework, these negative indicators had

no more place in the framework than the negative indicators that could be created for any of the

other statements. Since this was a framework designed to identify ways in which students

conceived of mathematics as sensible rather than ways in which they indicated that they did not,

negative indicators of any kind were not necessary.

Along with the elimination of negative indicators, several specific indicators were added

to the initial framework. These indicators came about when there were incidents in the data that

fit into the general categories of indicators but did not fit well with a specific indicator. For

example, there were several incidents in which students noticed and remarked upon a connection

between the current problem situation and another topic or concept in mathematics. This was

clearly related to expecting and seeing connections but not to any specific indicator in the

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category. For these situations, the indicator noticing mathematical connections was created.

Also added to the expecting and seeing connections category was mathematical humor since

most of this humor relies on understanding the underlying structure of mathematics and the

connections inherent in this structure. Several incidents were not coded with a specific indicator

but simply left coded with a category designation. This proved to be nonproblematic as the

framework continued to evolve.

Changes to the framework

The next stage in the evolution of the framework came about during data analysis as a

way to make sense out of what the different indicators indicated about students’ conceptions.

The indicators within each category were grouped into subcategories of behavior. In the

category of expecting explanations the indicators split into seeking explanations, explaining how,

and explaining why. The indicators in the connections category split into connections between

mathematics and other contexts and connections within mathematics. The indicators in the

assuming authority category split into students assuming mathematical authority and students

recognizing mathematics as authoritative. The indicators in the category of strategizing were

organized into strategizing about problem solving and seeking alternative solution strategies.

Without sufficient data from the current study to examine the possible dimensions of the stating

category, it was left to stand without subcategories. The resulting SCOMAS framework [see

Figure 6-1] moves somewhat away from an emphasis on specific, narrow indicators gleaned

from the literature to a framework which provides a way to look at the various dimensions of

students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible. Embedded within the subcategories of the

framework are still specific indicators but now, rather than constituting an exhaustive list of

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indicators, the indicators serve as illustrations for the kinds of activity that signal students’

conceptions related to the subcategories. This framework permits us to talk about students

demonstrating that they are seeing connections within mathematics by engaging in actions such

as recognizing similarities between problem situations, adapting problem solving strategies, and

coordinating multiple representations. This study has extended the current literature on

students’ conceptions of mathematics both by providing a framework permitting direct

observation of indicators of students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible and providing a

conceptual framework of the dimensions of that conception.

Figure 6-1. Students’ Conceptions of Mathematics as Sensible (SCOMAS) Framework

Challenges in studying students’ conceptions of mathematics

Although not intended as part of the study, this study produced some important findings

about the study of students’ conceptions about mathematics. To date, research on students’

conceptions of mathematics has been largely based on the use of surveys consisting of open-

ended or Likert-scale type items. These studies have been useful for identifying different

clusters of conceptions and constructing models of types of conceptions. Researchers have

variously identified such classifications as dynamic versus static (Grigutsch and Torner, 1998),

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modeling versus components versus abstract (Petocz et al., 2007), and fragments versus cohesive

(Crawford, Gordon, Nicholas, and Prosser, 1998a, 1998b). Using these classifications,

researchers have been able to draw conclusions about the prevalence of different types of

conceptions of mathematics within a population.

Limitations of survey items

One limitation of the research to date has been the challenge of identifying the likely

conceptions of mathematics of a small population or an individual. Many of these studies have

relied on survey using Likert-scale type items. Findings from this study raise serious questions

about the usefulness of such items for examining the conceptions of secondary school students.

In my interviews with small groups of students, they were asked to place statements about

conceptions on a continuum from strongly agree to strongly disagree and to discuss their

placement. These interviews yielded some valuable insights about the limitations of such

statements and raised serious questions about their validity as survey questions. Of the 10

conceptions statements used in this study, all presented difficulties for some students or were

modified or qualified by at least one student during the interviews.

Complex statements presented a challenge for most of the students interviewed in this

study. Three of the conceptions statements in this study were consistently misinterpreted or not

well-understood by the students involved. The statements “Math is memorizing and applying

definitions, formulas, facts, and procedures” (Grigutsch & Torner, 1998) and “Math is made up

of ideas, terms, and connections” (Grigutsch & Torner, 1998) both attempted to define

mathematics using a list of terms. Students in this study tended to focus in on particular terms in

the list for comment or to consider each term in turn to determine whether it was related to

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mathematics. There was only one group that actually considered the totality of one of the

statements (“Math is memorizing and applying definitions, formulas, facts, and procedures”) and

discussed whether the list of terms constituted a complete description of mathematics. However,

even this group did not analyze the other statement in the same manner. It seemed that students

in this study had difficulty focusing on and evaluating more than a single idea within a

conceptions statement.

A similar issue arose in relation to the statement “A lot of things in math must simply be

accepted as true and remembered; there really isn’t any explanation for them” (Carter &

Norwood, 1997). Students in this study tended to use this statement to talk about whether a good

memory is necessary in mathematics but not to account for the remainder of the statement.

When prompted, two groups did comment on whether things in mathematics had explanations

but, as illustrated by the following excerpt, they required substantial prompting.

I: The real question is, are there things in math that you just have to say,

okay, I believe it, I don’t understand why and there’s no good reason why

but someone says it’s true so it is.

Jenny: Well, there’s that but you also have to understand it. Like, I feel like if

you just say it’s right you really don’t get it. So I kind of like, yeah I kind

of like disagree with that ‘cause you should kind of like … I don’t know.

I: How about you guys?

Mike: [inaudible]

I: Okay. Do things always have, do things always have an explanation?

Jim: No.

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 I: Okay. So there are some things that you just have to believe are true

without an explanation?

Mike: Yeah.

Jenny: Yeah, I guess.

I: How about you?

Jim: I don’t really understand it.

I: Okay. There are some things in math that have to accept to be true. Mr.

Wingate tells you that, um, you know, anything raised to the zero is one

and you just have to accept that that’s true, there’s no explanation for it.

Jim: Oh, all right, yeah.

I: So there are times when there just isn’t an explanation.

Mike: Well like the formulas for like finding the area of a circle, we don’t really

know how that works. We just know it.

I: Okay. Do you think there is an explanation and you just don’t know it yet

or is there just not an explanation?

Mike: I just don’t think there is an explanation.

I: Okay. It’s just one of those things – the mysteries of the universe.

Mike: Yeah.

In this short excerpt, the interviewer rephrases the question seven times in order to get responses

from all group members and to verify what the students are saying. Even with this type of

prompting when the group was asked at the end of the interview if there were any statements that

they wished to revisit, one group member identified this statement.

I: Are there any others that we need to revisit?

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 Jenny: I’m still kind of confused about that one but I think like

I: You’re kind of confused about the wording of it?

Jenny: Yeah, I just like, I don’t [Jenny lapses into silence.]

Despite the multiple rewordings provided by the interviewer, this student still is not confident

that she understands the statement. Like the statements with lists of terms, students had

difficulty interpreting this compound statement.

Students in this study also tended to have difficulty interpreting statements that were

phrased negatively: “It is not important to understand why a procedure works as long as you get

the right answer” (Kloosterman & Stage, 1992), “You don’t have to have a good memory to be

good at math,” and “You can’t tell whether or not an answer is correct until someone tells you.”

In several cases, the interviewer rephrased the statement in the positive to make it easier for

students to interpret. For example, in one group a student struggled to interpret the statement

“You don’t have to have a good memory to be good at math” but, when the interviewer changed

the statement to the positive both group members easily expressed their opinion.

Jenny: You don’t have to have a good memory – wait, which one is, like if I

I: Would you like me to restate it to the positive? You need a good memory.

Jenny: Yeah.

I: Let’s do it that way. [Interviewer takes the card and writes “You need

good memory” and returns the card to Jenny.] Agree or disagree?

Jenny: Disagree.

I: How about you?

Larry: I definitely agree with that.

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Similar issues arose with the other negative statements with students having particular difficulty

with what it means to disagree with a statement that was already negative.

Other issues interpreting statements were not systematic but idiosyncratic to a particular

group or individual. One example of this occurred when a group was presented with the

statement, “Math is made up of unrelated topics” (Brown et al., 1988).

I: Math is made up of unrelated topics.

Jenny: Yes, definitely. Because we use science, we use

Jim: True, we use science

Jenny: We use math for science

Mike: History

Jenny: Or

Jim: Yeah, like for geography

Jenny: Yeah. So, definitely.

I: Okay.

Jenny: So we’ll put it like close to the top. A little bit at the top.

I: Okay.

In this case, the students did not interpret the statement as a statement about the connected nature

of mathematics but rather about the connections between mathematics and other academic

subjects. In addition, they rated the statement in the opposite direction on the scale from that

which would ordinarily be expected. If students in this group had been rating this statement in a

setting in which they were not providing explanations, their placement of the statement would be

interpreted as these students believing that mathematics is not connected in nature.

149
 An individual in one group similarly rated a statement in a manner opposite to that which

might be expected.

I: So, where would you put it? Knowing how to solve is as important as

getting the solution.

Jerry: I’m going to go like, probably, here because I’m a little bit disagreeing

with how it’s saying it’s just as important as figuring out the answer.

I: You’re saying it’s more important?

Jerry: Yeah, it’s more, definitely more important to know how to do it than to

figure out the answer. The answer would probably come last is my

solution, or problem solving thing ‘cause I want to know how to do it

before I can find the answer.

Jerry’s disagreement with the statement would, in a survey situation, be interpreted as a

conception that solutions were more important than understanding when he is actually saying

that it is more important.

Given the difficulties students in this group had interpreting conceptions statements, it is

clear that, if they were to answer these questions in a survey situation with no opportunity to

explain their answers, discuss their interpretation of the statement, or have the statements

reworded for them, that the survey would yield little valid data about their conceptions of

mathematics. This raises concerns about the validity of survey instruments, in general, for

studying student conceptions. More importantly, it points to the limitation of such instruments

for determining the conceptions of individual secondary school students or small groups of such

students.

150
Limitations of interviews

Results from the interviews in this study also point to the limitations of interviews for

determining the conceptions of mathematics of secondary school students. Although in many

cases students’ statements during interviews affirmed what was found in the classroom

observations, there were several substantial limitations.

One difficulty, as already illustrated in some of the incidents in the previous section, is

the challenge of finding clear ways to talk about conceptions of mathematics. For example, even

simplifying the statement, “A lot of things in math must simply be accepted as true and

remembered; there really isn’t any explanation for them” (Carter & Norwood, 1997) to “do

things always have an explanation?” left some students puzzling about what was being asked.

Similarly, although students readily agreed with the statement, “Knowing how to solve a

problem is as important as getting the solution” (Brown et al., 1988), some students, as

illustrated by the following conversation, saw the statement as nonsensical.

I: Let’s see, knowing how to solve a problem is as important as getting the

solution right.

Rachel: Well, you have to know how to get the solution, if you have to solve it.

Sarah: Yeah, you,

Rachel: In order to solve it you have to know what you are doing and then, to get

the solution, you have to know how to solve it.

I: So you’re basically saying you really can’t solve it without knowing how.

Sarah & Rachel: Yeah.

I: Okay.

Sarah: Put that up there. We’re kind of going along.

151
 These two students could not visualize the dichotomy intended in the statement.

Although some of the difficulty that students had interpreting the conceptions statements may be

attributed to wording of the statements, much of the difficulty may lie in the very nature of

conceptions of mathematics. I suspect many students have never before thought about or been

asked to discuss their conceptions of the nature of mathematics. It is also likely that many

students, even if they had thought about their conceptions, could not clearly articulate those

conceptions.

This same difficulty in understanding and articulating their own conceptions may explain

some of the discrepancies that arose between what students said during interviews and what was

observed in class using the framework. The most illustrative of these discrepancies is the one

between what some students said about the role of memory in mathematics and what was

observed in the classroom. During the interviews individual students often expressed strong

agreement that memory is an important factor in mathematics. They did so in the context of

agreeing with the statement “A lot of things in math must simply be accepted as true and

remembered; there really isn’t any explanation for them” (Carter & Norwood, 1997) or by

disagreeing that “You don’t have to have a good memory to be good at math.” Despite the

emphasis on memory in many of the interviews, there were no instances, during the 4 weeks of

observation data, in which students discussed relying on memory to engage with problems or

used memory as an excuse not to engage with mathematics. The common classroom refrains of

“oh, I remember you just …” or “Oh no, I can’t remember how to do this” were conspicuously

absent from this classroom. Instead, students tended to display strategizing and to seek

connections to other problems whenever they were asked to solve problems. When it came to

152
the role of memory, the indicators observed in the classroom were somewhat inconsistent with

what students said in interviews.

A similar difference arose with respect to students’ discussions about the statement

“There is always a rule to follow in solving math problems” (Telese, 1999; Brown et al., 1988).

Students’ general agreement with this statement and comments about the statement would seem

to indicate that they believed that problem solving in mathematics was about following the

correct rule for solving each type of problem. One student stated, “there’s always a different

way, ’cause different problems have different rules to solve them.” Despite these comments,

there was no evidence in the classroom of students seeking rules for specific types of

mathematics problems. Instead, indicators relating to strategizing and making connections in

mathematics point to students solving problems based on extending and using knowledge of

solution strategies from other problems and attending to the mathematical properties of the

problem to strategize solution methods.

These two discrepancies between what students said interviews and their classroom

actions highlight an inherent difficulty with using interviews to determine the conceptions about

mathematics of secondary school students. It seems that students have difficulty interpreting

conceptions statements in useful ways and have difficulty expressing their conceptions of

mathematics. Although it is possible that there is a true mismatch between students’ conceptions

of mathematics and their mathematical activity, it seems more logical to assume that the

mismatch is between students’ statements about conceptions and their mathematical activity.

153
Implications of this study

Findings from this study have some important implications both for classroom practice

and for research.

Implications for classroom practice

This study has important implications for our expectation that all students can develop a

productive disposition towards mathematics. It is sometimes assumed that such a disposition is

characteristic of gifted students (Krutetski, 1976) but this study provides an existence proof that

such a conception can characterize struggling students as well. Students involved in this study

had struggled with learning mathematics and had a history of being less than successful

mathematics students yet, as individuals and as a class, they provided multiple indicators that

they conceived of mathematics as sensible. The implication for teachers and students is that

there is reason to expect that every student can develop a productive disposition towards

mathematics.

Implications for research

This study has important implications for how we study students’ conceptions of

mathematics. The findings raise serious questions about the usefulness of both survey research

and interview research for studying conceptions. The SCOMAS framework, by providing

action-based, observable indicators of students’ conceptions provides both an alternative to

research relying on students’ self reports and a way to triangulate data from these other sources.

154
 Suggestions for further study

The purpose of this study was to develop an initial framework for studying students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible. Although the initial indicators were piloted in several

classes, the SCOMAS framework was developed in the context of one carefully selected

secondary mathematics classroom. The usefulness, completeness, and validity of the framework

need to be tested in other secondary mathematics classrooms. It might also be helpful to use the

framework within different grade bands and with different populations of students both to test

the framework and to begin to look at differences that may exist in students’ conceptions of

mathematics as sensible. .

The SCOMAS framework provides opportunities for additional research about the

continued development of conceptions of students over time and about the durability of

conceptions developed during the course of an academic year. One possible direction for future

research is to use the framework to follow a group of students over the course of several school

years, examining the ways in which the students’ conceptions change over time and the effect

that different course material, different classroom settings, and student maturity have on

indicators that students’ see mathematics as sensible.

A critical future direction of this research is looking at the instructional practices related

to the development of students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible. The SCOMAS

framework provides a necessary tool for establishing the dimensions along which students’

conceive of mathematics as sensible. Given that this is a conception that is an important part of

mathematical proficiency, we next need to try to determine instructional practices that may play

a role in the development of such a conception. A future research study should examine the

155
instructional practices in classrooms in which students’ actions indicate that they conceive of

mathematics as sensible.

Future research in this area needs to include a focus on testing and improving the

framework. It should also include research in which the framework is used as tool to further

investigate students’ conceptions of mathematics as sensible. Finally, the framework should be

used as a tool for investigating instructional practices related to the development of students’

conceptions of mathematics as sensible.

156
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 Maureen M. Grady
PO Box 671, Milroy, PA 17063
717-667-9173, mmg250@psu.edu

EDUCATION
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
PhD - August 2013, Emphasis in Mathematics Education, Advisor: Dr. Fran Arbaugh
Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Delaware, OH, Master’s of Divinity - 1990
Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, BA in Mathematics – 1985, Emphasis in Secondary Education
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Major: Computer Engineering
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Teaching Assistant , 2010-2011, The Pennsylvania State University
Research Assistant, 2008-present, The Pennsylvania State University
Secondary Mathematics Teacher, 1997-2008
Adjunct Mathematics Instructor, 1996-2001, Springfield College School of Human Services
Secondary Mathematics Teacher, 1985-1987
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
• Reviewer for Journal of Research in Rural Education.
• Session recorder at the Conference on Mathematical Proficiency for Teaching - 2010 and 2009
PUBLICATIONS IN PEER REVIEWED CONFERENCE PROCEDINGS
• Heid, M.K., Karunakara, S., Kinol, D., Grady, M. (2009). The roles of processes in the personal and
classroom mathematics of a beginning secondary mathematics teacher. Proceedings of the conference of
the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.
• Heid, M. K., Grady, M., Karunakaran, S., Jairam, A., Freeburn, B., & Lee, Y. (2012). A processes approach to
mathematical knowledge for teaching: The case of a beginning teacher. Proceedings of the 34th annual
meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics
Education. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University.
PRESENTATIONS
• Grady, M. (2013, April). Students' conceptions of mathematics as sensible and related instructional
practices: Ramifications for teachers and teacher educators. Paper presented at the National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
• Grady, M. (2013, January). Students' conceptions of mathematics as sensible and related instructional
practices: Potential uses of indicators with pre-service mathematics teachers. Paper presented at the
Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators Annual Conference, Orlando, FL.
• Grady, M. (2012, October). Students' conceptions of mathematics as sensible and related instructional
practices: a report of initial research findings. Poster presented at the 34th annual meeting of the North
American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Kalamazoo,
MI: Western Michigan University.
• Grady, M. (2012, May). Students' conceptions of mathematics as sensible and related instructional
practices: A status report on doctoral research. Presentation to the Pennsylvania Association of
Mathematics Teacher Educators. Shippensburg, PA: Shippensburg University.
• Heid, M.K., Grady, M., Karunakaran, S., Jairam, A., Freeburn, B., & Lee, Y. (2012, April). Influences on
mathematical process use by a novice teacher. Paper presented at the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics Research Presession, Philadelphia, PA.
• Heid, M.K., Karunakara, S., Kinol, D., Grady, M. (2010). Factors Influencing the Role of Mathematical
Processes in a Beginning Secondary Teacher's Classroom Teaching. Paper presented at the conference of
the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA
HONORS/AWARDS
• Graduate Fellowship, Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning, 2008.
• Awarded the Gindelsberger Memorial Award for Excellence in Biblical Scholarship, 1990.
• Awarded the John and Mary Alford Memorial Scholarship, 1987.