General Education Teachers' Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With (and Without) Disabilities

• In Event: Preparing General Education Teachers to Promote Justice and Equity for Students With Disabilities

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this study was to uncover teachers’ talk about the mathematical capabilities of students with (and without) disabilities. Existing coding schemes treat teachers’ views as uniform across students despite evidence that teachers hold different views of different students, in part, because of the multiple and varied identities students bring to the classroom. By using an adapted interview protocol, which yielded more (and more nuanced) analytic categories I foregrounded students’ disability status as a factor that relates to differences in teachers’ conceptions of who they view as mathematically capable.

Theoretical Framework
Derived from Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis, Snow and Benford (1988) describe three types of frames that facilitate sense-making: diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational, the first two of which were used in this study. Diagnostic frames reveal what people view as the underlying cause of the problem; prognostic frames are concerned with both solutions to the problem and strategies about how to enact those solutions.

Methods and Data Sources
For this mixed methods study, I interviewed general education mathematics teachers (N = 20) about their students (n = 407) using an adapted version of Jackson et al.’s (2017) semi-structured protocol that focused on uncovering teachers’ usages of diagnostic and prognostic frames. I used open and concept coding to develop an expanded version of Jackson et al.’s coding scheme and then applied the new coding framework to the entire dataset. I used student demographic data to compare within-group percentages, noticing to what degree students with disabilities were represented within particular qualitative categories in relation to their representation within the entire dataset (e.g., if 30% of the entire sample was students with disabilities, I would expect 30% of the students in the unproductive behavior category to be students with disabilities). I also used the transformed data to estimate two multinomial logistic regressions, one which used diagnostic frames as the outcome variable and one which used prognostic frames as the outcome variable; both models used students’ disability status and teacher dummy codes as predictor variables.

Results
The majority of teachers in this sample explained mathematical struggle in unproductive terms and said they would aim instructional adjustment at unproductive outcomes for students with and without disabilities. However, students with disabilities were overrepresented in unproductive categories and underrepresented in productive categories in relation to both diagnostic and prognostic frames. Regression analyses indicated a student was statistically less likely to get a productive diagnostic or prognostic frame if they had a disability label.

Scholarly Significance
Findings from this study highlight the necessity of including teachers’ views of their students’ mathematical capabilities in instructional improvement efforts. Second, they indicate student-level factors, like disability status, relate to qualitatively and quantitatively meaningful differences in teachers’ views of their students, suggesting the importance of attending to broader narratives around constructs, such as (dis)ability, race, and gender that may be associated with teachers’ views and the subsequent enactments of those views in mathematics instruction.

Author

• Erica N. Mason, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author