BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Highlighted Session: I Don’t Know How To Do That Using Mathematics

Mon, March 26, 8:00 to 9:30am, Fiesta Inn Centro Histórico, Floor: Lobby Floor, Room D

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In one of the research sites, the researcher was interviewing a grade 1 student. The interviewer gave the child a bunch of counters and told the child that he could use these to help him solve the problem if he wanted to. Next the researcher asked the child: “If 3 friends share 18 candies equally, can you work out for me how many candies each of the friends will get?” The child did not touch the counters, nor did the child write anything on the paper provided. Instead, the child sat still for a very long time. After a while the researcher asked the child: “What are you thinking?” and the child responded: “I don’t know how to work out the answer using mathematics!” The researcher went on to encourage the child not to think about the problem as a mathematics problem but rather as a normal day-to-day problem that needed to be solved. To illustrate the point, the researcher counted out 6 counters and said to the child: “If you and I shared these counters, can you show me how many each of us would get?” The child reached for the counters, gave two to the researcher and took two for himself. He then gave the researcher another counter, took one more for himself, and said “We will each get three.” The researcher then asked: “Could you use the same approach to determine how many candies each of the 3 friends will get when they share 18 candies equally among them?” This time the child counted out 18 counters and he put 4 counters in each of three piles and then looked at the counters remaining and put another 2 counters on each pile. He said: “Each friend will get 6 candies.”
RTI International (RTI) and its partners are implementing the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and United Kingdom’s Agency for International Development (UKAID) funded Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Initiative (RAMP). RAMP is a nationwide initiative of the Jordanian Ministry of Education (MoE) designed to improve the reading and mathematics skills of students in kindergarten 2 through grade 3 (K2–G3). RAMP, which is being carried out over five years (2015 to 2019), expects to deliver improved reading and mathematics instruction to all public school students in Jordan in grades K2–G3—about 400,000 students.
Central to the RAMP approach to improving mathematics performance is supporting a shift from mathematics as “the memorization of facts, rules and procedures to produce an answer” to mathematics as a “meaningful, sense-making problem solving activity”. This panel explores the impact of the mathematics component of the RAMP initiative by reporting on a research study that examined the classroom implementation of the problem solving component of the mathematics program.
The first presentation provides background to the role of problem solving in the mathematics component of the RAMP initiative.
The second presentation describes the findings of a research activity designed to investigate the classroom implementation of the problem solving aspect of the mathematics component of the RAMP initiative. The presentation will reveal that despite training and classroom based coaching, teacher’s implementation of the problem solving aspect falls far short of the vision.
The third and final presentation will describe how the findings of the midline Early Grade Mathematics (EGMA) assessment suggest that while the mathematics component of the RAMP initiative are bearing some fruit, the impact falls short of the impact that the reading component of RAMP is having. The presentation goes on to describe some of the MoE’s efforts to improve the fidelity of implementation of the mathematics component of the initiative.
The panel contributes to the conference theme, “Re-mapping Global Education”, by focusing on need for the teacher to be seen as a researcher as opposed to the implementer of so-called research-based solutions

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations