Education

Minority Access to Revolutionary Instructional Extensions (MATRIX) is a two-part supplemental elementary mathematics curriculum based on six games coupled with a focus on parental involvement and advocacy. One curricular goal incorporates student's culture into its design to show mathematics comes from many cultures and is an evolving discipline in which students can be active participants. The article data comes from a larger pilot study conducted in a rural African American community. This article speaks specifically about the ethnomathematical games in the curriculum in addition to discussing the " lessons learned " by the researchers for the opportunity for teachers to be leaders in incorporating community cultures into classroom practice.

This study explored how instructional approaches utilizing the oft-overlooked nonsynonymous nature of 'arithmetic' and 'mathematics' may alter student's mathematics performance. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of one such approach using the game of chess. Chess is a board game in which a winning strategy relies on logic and spatial reasoning, two aspects that are also an integral part of mathematics. Because of this, chess was an ideal vehicle for this study. We had 45 students in grades 3-6 participate in this study. Participants received 8 weekly sessions of chess instruction and peer chess play. The chess curriculum did not include any explicit mathematics instruction. Data was collected using pre and post tests on the first and last sessions. Tests measured student's ability to solve grade level appropriate word problems, logic problems, and arithmetic. Students showed increased accuracy solving word problems and logic problems...

Many challenging social issues (e.g. stereotyping, democracy, racism, cultural difference, integration, segregation, to name only a few) emerge from documentarian Ted Green’s WFYI production, Attucks: The School That Opened A City. Grappling with these issues is central to children’s understanding of society, therefore they are addressed in this elementary, middle, and high school curriculum guide. Our purpose is to illustrate how these issues can be approached through developmentally appropriate, meaningful instruction while also attending to assessments of how children are learning and responding. It requires that teachers, as always, not only spend time preparing for lessons but also make time for analytical reflection, for developing rigorous cultural sensitivity, and for a constant questioning of one’s own values and of our goals for children’s education

Background: Women of color are disproportionately represented in STEM fields. While many systemic barriers exist due to institutional racism, other barriers begin in school that impact students’ perceptions of self and STEM. Identity formation is an integral part of learner development but adverse learning experiences have drastic effects on Black girls’ perceptions and self-efficacy within STEM fields. Girls STEM Institute (GSI) is an organization that develops a transformative space to empower girls of color through exploration of STEM concepts in meaningful, culturally-grounded ways. The purpose of this study is to examine and explore how the GSI experience impact students’ interest and attitudes towards STEM fields. Methods: The STEM semantics survey measuring students’ interest in STEM subjects and careers was conducted amongst 42 scholars. Student perceptions of their GSI experience were obtained through journal reflections. A literature review was conducted to gain an underst...

By focusing on the voices of African American mathematics learners, this dissertation seeks to address a gap the in the problem solving and gender literature. Using a preexisting data set from the Mathematical Identity and Development Project (MIDDLE), I used mixed methods to provide a rich description of African American students as mathematical problem solvers and mathematics learners through the examination of students' strategy use on items assessing rational number and measurement concepts and student responses from mathematical autobiographies and student interviews. In this study, components of Schoenfeld (1985, 2006) and Polya's (1957) frameworks for successful problem solving was the tool of analysis. Eight major conclusions emerged from the study. Two conclusions address strategy use and success and nonsuccess during problem solving two address students' understanding, two addresse gender differences, and two address the profiles of student learners. A major fi...

Museums are places where material culture and specimens from nature provide opportunities to help visitors understand their lifeworld—sometimes of the ordinary, sometimes extraordinary, but always within the context of relationships to people, places and time. The encounter with museum objects provides the visitor with the range of possible human experiences, a personal sense of the life of another as it was lived, or simply provides access to the vital and fundamental aspects of being human—a phenomenological museum curriculum. Yet, despite the prospect of being a multi-sensory milieu, museums offer a peculiar provocation to the senses: just look, don’t touch. By framing the considerations of the need for touch as a gateway to other sensory experiences within the museum, our intent is to explore the ideas of materiality, haptic touch, and the person-object transaction and its place within the museum curriculum. We apply these concepts to the idea of phenomenological touch in the museum setting as a new orientation for meaningful person-object transactions.

This paper investigates an interdisciplinary perspective on museum research, offering a new orientation and methodology for fieldwork. It begins from the stance of "object knowledge", which describes the ways of knowing that come from human interaction with and study of physical objects. Next, is the documentation of the power of objects to define the lived experience of time, place, and identity, presented with an applied and theoretical perspective on tangible objects and their relationship to lived experience. Through object knowledge we argue that museums can better understand their impact and influence on visitors and define the ways that objects and artifacts serve as key aspects of human life that contribute to multiple ways of knowing. To make use of this perspective, phenomenology, as a field methodology is most useful in studying visitor experiences and interactions with objects, artifacts, and exhibitions. As an underused strategy for research in museums, phenomenology offers a way of investigating the relationship between viewer and object that can help scholars better understand the meaning of museums and their relationship to our human worlds of knowing, being and experiencing history, the arts, the sciences. This process offers a re-engaging with the muses, so to speak. Using multidisciplinary theory drawn from education, information studies, semiotics, anthropology, and history, researchers can better ascertain the meaning and impact of museums from a decidedly human standpoint. The convergence of object knowledge and phenomenological fieldwork offers exciting new avenues to continue the study of material culture and museums while enhancing our understanding of the human experience.