Beyond Teaching to the Standards: A Text-as-Data Approach to Learn How Teachers Curate Online Math Instructional Resources to Align With Common Core State Standards Math Standards

• In Event: Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: Social Media in Education

Abstract

Objectives
Employed with text analyses tools, this paper aims to examine the process of how teachers align their mathematics teaching materials curated online with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics.

Theoretical framework
In a post No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) era, teachers are expected to deliver, with fidelity, state standards within their classrooms (Porter, 2002). Yet, teachers, as street-level bureaucrats, make professional decisions to respond to policy through teaching and instructional practices (Lipsky, 1980). Teachers’ efforts include how and to what extent to align standards to instruction while satisfying local classroom needs.
Often, teachers may turn to social media, such as Pinterest, to curate instructional resources for teaching activities (Authors, 2018). Since teaching practices are implemented through the materials teachers intend to teach, this study argues that the content of online teaching materials curated by teachers directly reflect teachers’ interpretation of CCSS standards and teachers’ decisions of what and how to teach.

Methods
This paper employees a text-as-data analysis tool called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA classifies topics of text-based corpus and generates probabilities belonging to a topic for each document (such as a pin description or a CCSS standard within a domain) and each word from the documents. We analyze the CCSS mathematics standards and the curated mathematics pins with two separate LDAs. Then we compare LDA results of topics between the CCSS mathematics standards and teachers’ curated mathematics pins to analyze the alignment between standards and the curated mathematics pins.

Data
We identify and analyze 26,009 mathematics pins curated by 241 elementary teachers within Pinterest. Teachers are sampled from an NSF study on elementary teachers’ mathematics instruction within the Midwest. We also retrieved 178 CCSS mathematics standards in six domains that covers from Kindergarten to grade five.

Preliminary results and discussion
Preliminary LDA analyses of CCSS mathematics standards find a single standard in the CCSS can contain multiple topics, such as a standard of reasoning with shapes and shapes’ attributes belongs to the topics of geometry and measurement. This suggests that teachers teaching one standard may need to connect their instructions with the other domains of mathematics concrete knowledge.
Observing the LDA results for the curated mathematics pins, we found the CCSS core words scattered across the topics of mathematics pins. Also, the word “common core” possessing a heavy weight in a topic about student practice and activity. Moreover, based on the high-probability words within each topic, we observed that the curated mathematics pins contain rich non-mathematics specific knowledge that are related to pedagogy, teaching, or the nuts and bolts of teaching, including assembling materials (e.g., binder and notebook), inspiring affective emotions (e.g., love and motivation), and identifying how to engage students (e.g., assess and question). Connections to other academic subjects including reading and art were also observed (e.g., read and paint). These findings suggest that teachers may connect teaching CCSS mathematics standards to the larger landscape of teaching content, interweaving their pedagogical knowledge and teaching practice skills to satisfy their classroom needs.

Author

• Zixi Chen, Michigan State University