CAREER: Designing an elementary after-school mathematics program to expand conceptions of mathematics for teachers and students

About This Grant

This five-year CAREER grant will investigate how to design an after-school mathematics space within a school setting that can challenge and expand both students' and teachers' conceptions of what doing mathematics means and teach them to see participation in the discipline in increasingly nuanced and expansive ways. Informal learning contexts can encourage engagement by allowing students opportunities to choose their own activities and provide a playful environment. The study focuses on designing an after-school program to support recreational mathematics activities for elementary students. At the same time, teachers who are supporting the after-school program with students will have the opportunity to learn to notice different forms of mathematical participation and learning. The program will serve to help teachers and students see mathematics as creative and joyful - as something people might choose to do. This design-based study, situated in two elementary school sites, seeks to iteratively design a community of practice for doing mathematics that expands both teachers' and students' capacity to recognize and value a broad range of mathematical participation and interest. Teachers will have the opportunity to engage in the after-school program and learn about different forms of mathematical engagement and activity. The project will identify design features, principles, processes, and underlying theory that contribute to expanding students' understanding of and participation in mathematics. Similarly, the project will also contribute to developing teachers' curiosity about student thinking and their capacity to notice mathematical participation in nuanced ways. A teacher professional learning community will meet regularly to investigate, discuss, and plan what is happening in the after-school program. The data collection will focus on documenting both students' experiences in the recreational mathematics program and teachers' perceptions of students' mathematical thinking. Data collected include teacher and student interviews, video of the after-school program and the professional learning community, student-created artifacts of mathematics, and field notes. The iterative, multi-layered analysis will examine how the learning environment is designed and developed over time. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) is an applied research program that seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for funded projects. This project is also supported by the AISL program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.