Incorporating Rough Drafts and Revising into Mathematics Teaching to Support Students with Taking Intellectual Risks

• In Event: New Frameworks, Methods, and Teaching Strategies for Understanding and Addressing Emotions in Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Objective

This presentation has two objectives: (1) To share conjectures about how mathematics instruction that incorporates rough drafts and revising can be supportive of students’ motivation and engagement, including affective engagement. (2) To share emerging findings of student level motivation and engagement outcomes from classrooms with these teaching practices.

Perspective

Adolescents often fear being incorrect in front of peers in the mathematics classroom (Lampert et al., 1996). Students’ attention to social comparisons increases upon entry to middle school as they become more concerned with social acceptance, which is paramount to their overall sense of well‐being (Harter, 1990). Asking students to describe their thinking about mathematics in a group setting can exasperate social comparisons. Adolescents are often reluctant to do anything that causes them to stand out from the group (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997), so middle‐schoolers may hesitate to expose their thinking publicly.
Incorporating rough drafting and revising in mathematics classrooms is a promising set of teaching practices that can be used to support adolescents (AUTHOR). One of these practices is treating all mathematical thinking as a draft, or work in progress that can be revised, whether it is correct or incorrect. Another practice is intentionally providing students with opportunities to revisit and improve their work and thinking.

Data sources and methods

This presentation addresses two questions: What does mathematics instruction look like when middle school teachers incorporate rough drafts and revising? What do their students report about their motivation and engagement? We are studying effects of these teaching practices on middle school students’ emotions, motivational goals, self-concepts, and sense of belonging (e.g., degree to which our conjectures hold in practice). Data sources include analyses of 15 middle school mathematics lessons from classrooms where teachers promote drafting and revising intentionally, as well as student level survey data from these classrooms. We are analyzing videos using an observation rubric that is undergoing validity testing; videos are analyzed in pairs with reconciliation over disagreements. At this early stage in year 1 of data collection, we will present descriptive data of students’ survey responses.

Conjectured Results

We conjecture that, if strengths in students’ drafts are emphasized, students will be more likely to report positive emotions about mathematics and themselves as learners of mathematics (Middleton et al, 2023). We also conjecture that, if students have regular opportunities to revise their mathematics work, middle school students will be more likely to develop higher mastery goals (Ames, 1992; Midgley et al., 2000) and a stronger self-concept in mathematics (Simkins et al., 2006). Additionally, we conjecture that if students regularly experience learning with and from peers through collaborating to understand each others’ drafts and revise, they are likely to experience a stronger sense of belonging in mathematics (Barbieri & Miller-Cotto, 2021).

Significance

Prior self-reports from teachers suggest that drafting and revising in mathematics positively supports students (AUTHOR). This research endeavor is a step towards empirically investigating teachers’ reports, including identifying nuanced enactments of drafting and revising that may be less motivating and engaging for students.

Authors

• Amanda Jansen, University of Delaware

• Leigh McLean, University of Delaware

• Christina Areizaga Barbieri, University of Delaware