Abstract
Engaging students as active participants in mathematics classroom discussions has great potential to promote student learning. Less well understood is how teachers can promote beneficial student participation, and how teacher-student interaction relates to student achievement. This study examined how the kinds of teacher practices that may encourage beneficial student participation relate to student achievement in elementary school mathematics classrooms. Using videotaped recordings, we examined the extent to which students explained their own ideas and engaged with others’ ideas and how teachers supported these kinds of student participation. Linking teacher practices, student participation, and achievement all at the individual student level, we found that student achievement was best predicted by the combination of teacher practices and student participation. The results show that taking into account student participation is necessary for understanding how teaching practices relate to student mathematics learning.
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Notes
Similar recommendations appear in curriculum standards in other countries, such as the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers Standards for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics in Australian Schools (2006); Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (2012), and New Zealand Curriculum (2008).
An additional standardized mathematics achievement measure was initially considered as a posttest measure. However, the high, positive correlation between the prior achievement measure and standardized achievement measure, r(71) = .69, p < .01, indicated that none of the other variables would significantly relate to posttest achievement after partialling out the influence of prior achievement.
All analyses were run using HLM for Windows (Raudenbush, Bryk, Cheong, Congdon, & du Toit, 1996–2011). All variables in the analyses were group-mean centered (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002); the intercept represents the average classroom outcome and the slopes represent the within-classroom relationships.
To ensure that students from a single classroom were not driving results, all regression analyses were also carried out omitting students from one classroom at a time. The point estimates changed very little, suggesting that no particular classroom of students was overly influential.
Results from ordinary least squares regression analyses that did not take into account the nested structure of the data mirrored those of the HLM analyses. For simplicity, we do not show those results here.
Following Preacher and Hayes (2008), we also calculated a bootstrap confidence interval for the indirect effect. Consistent with the results of the Sobel z test, the confidence interval did not include zero, also providing further evidence of a non-zero mediation effect.
The discussion of 0/3 lasted for 17 min where extensive exchange occurs across students, and the ideas in this exchange are further interrogated.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant (#R305A100181) from the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ alone and do not reflect the views or policies of the funding agency. We wish to thank Nicholas C. Johnson for his helpful comments on this article.
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Ing, M., Webb, N.M., Franke, M.L. et al. Student participation in elementary mathematics classrooms: the missing link between teacher practices and student achievement?. Educ Stud Math 90, 341–356 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-015-9625-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-015-9625-z