Positioning Multilingual Learners

Teachers’ positioning can affect multilingual learners’ participation, identity, and mathematical success. Learn what positioning is and how to productively position multilingual learners in your classroom.

Increasing the Number Sense Understanding of Preschool Students With ASD

Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) academic skills supports their future opportunities. For example, early number sense skills are predictive of future mathematical success for all children including children with ASD. Yet, research on foundational early childhood mathematics skills of children with ASD is limited. This study used an adapted version of Number Talks to increase the number sense skills of preschool children with ASD. Number Talks is a constructivist approach that was combined with systematic instruction (i.e., system of least prompts and modeling) in this study. A multiple probe across participants design established a functional relation between using an adapted version of Number Talks and the early number sense skills of preschool children with ASD. Findings suggest using an adapted version of Number Talks can increase the early number sense skills of preschool children with ASD. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life offers readers guidance in managing the fear, freedom, frustration, and joy that often accompany calls to think mathematically. With practical insight and years of award-winning mathematics teaching experience, DAgostino offers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of fractals, symmetry, fuzzy logic, knot theory, Penrose patterns, infinity, the Twin Prime Conjecture, Arrows Impossibility Theorem, Fermats Last Theorem, and other intriguing mathematical topics. Readers are encouraged to embrace change, proceed at their own pace, mix up their routines, resist comparison, have faith, fail more often, look for beauty, exercise their imaginations, and define success for themselves. Mathematics students and enthusiasts will learn advice for fostering courage on their journey regardless of age or mathematical background. How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers not only engaging mathematical content but provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude.

“Asians Are Good at Math” Is Not a Compliment: STEM Success as a Threat to Personhood

In this conceptual article, Niral Shah critically analyzes how the narrative that “Asians are good at math” positions Asian people as racial subjects. Despite being false, the “Asians are good at math” narrative is prominent in STEM education and is also familiar to the general public. To analyze the narrative's discursive impact on Asian personhood, Shah uses poststructural race theory and Mills's notion of the racial contract, focusing on the interaction between discourses of STEM and discourses of race. Rather than a harmless compliment, Shah argues that the type of mathematical success implied in the narrative dehumanizes Asian people and perpetuates White supremacy, and calls for racial equity and justice work in STEM education to account for ontological questions of personhood alongside traditional concerns about academic content learning and economic access to STEM careers.

Attending to Evidence of Students' Thinking during Instruction

This article explores three processes involved in attending to evidence of students' thinking, one of the Mathematics Teaching Practices in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. These processes, explored during an activity on proportional relationships, are discussed in this article, another installment in the series.

Prove It to Me!

Engage your learners through tasks proven to significantly promote reasoning and problem solving, which touch on many of the Mathematics Teaching Practices in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. These tasks are discussed in this article, another installment in the series.

Tools for Facilitating Meaningful Mathematics Discourse

This article explores facilitating meaningful mathematics discourse, one of the research-based practices described in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. Two tools that can support teachers in strengthening their classroom discourse are discussed in this, another installment in the series.

The Decision-Making Protocol for Mathematics Coaching: Addressing the Complexity of Coaching With Intentionality and Reflection

More than ever, mathematics coaches are being called on to support teachers in developing effective classroom practices. Coaching that influences professional growth of teachers is best accomplished when mathematics coaches are supported to develop knowledge related to the work of coaching. This article details the implementation of the Decision-Making Protocol for Mathematics Coaching (DMPMC) across 3 cases. The DMPMC is a framework that brings together potentially productive coaching activities (Gibbons & Cobb, 2017) and the research-based Mathematics Teaching Practices (MTPs) in Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All (NCTM, 2014) and aims to support mathematics coaches to purposefully plan coaching interactions. The findings suggest the DMPMC supported mathematics coaches as they worked with classroom teachers while also providing much-needed professional development that enhanced their coaching practice.

Detecting and Reducing Bias in Questioning Patterns

This article explores teaching practices described in NCTM's Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. Investigating and mitigating implicit bias in questions are discussed in this article, which is another installment in the series.