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

• In Event: Social Opportunity Spaces: How Social Media Can Inform/Shape Educational Policy Processes

Abstract

Teachers nowadays are turning to social media platforms, such as Pinterest, to curate instructional resources (Authors, 2018). The growth of this phenomenon, which has become even more crucial after the lockdown of schools amid COVID-19 pandemic when schooling shifts to the digital world, leads to an urgent need of understanding the nature of teachers’ online curation behavior and the quality of the resources for instruction and learning.
In a post-No-Child-Left-Behind-Act-era, students’ performance can only be accountable when the contents in the tests are offered with sufficient time, and teachers are expected to deliver state standards within their classrooms (Porter, 2002; McDonnell, 1995). Yet, teachers, as street-level bureaucrats, make professional decisions to respond to policy through teaching and instructional practices (Lipsky, 2010). The current study argues that teachers’ curated resources reflect teachers’ interpretation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and their decisions of what and how to teach, since teaching practices are implemented through the materials teachers intend to use.
Utilizing computational text analysis tools, the current study aims to classify the content of the curated mathematical instructional resources (i.e., pins), and how those resources are aligned with CCSS. The preliminary sample contains 26,009 mathematics pins that are curated by 241 elementary teachers within Pinterest. Teachers are sampled from an NSF study on elementary teachers’ mathematics instruction in the Midwest. Each pin has text-based information of description, title, and the curated time of a teacher user.
A dictionary of CCSS is developed by the official 178 standards which cover the six domains required for Kindergarten to fifth grade. This dictionary is used to label CCSS terms in pins and score pins’ alignment with a CCSS domain. A validation set of around 4000 hand-coded pins are used to verify the labeling and scoring. Also, text networks are computed to compare the most associated words of standards in the official CCSS documents and the curated pins. Then a topic analysis (i.e., structural topic modeling) is utilized to classify the latent topics of the pins. Finally, each pin is associated with a topic and a CCSS alignment score.
Preliminary topic analysis results show that the CCSS content words were scattered across the topics of pins. Also, the word “common core” possessed 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 pins contain rich non-mathematics specific knowledge that are related to pedagogy, teaching, or the nuts and bolts of teaching, including assembling materials, inspiring affective emotions, and identifying how to engage students. Connections to other academic subjects including reading and art were also observed. These findings suggest that teachers may connect teaching CCSS to the larger landscape of teaching content, interweaving their pedagogical knowledge and teaching practice skills to satisfy their classroom needs. The future research will analyze the pins of each topic at the aggregated CCSS domain levels, by teacher attributes, and across time.

Authors

• Zixi Chen, Michigan State University

• Kaitlin T. Torphy Knake, Michigan State University

• Hamid Karimi, Michigan State University

• Jordan Tait, Michigan State University