This five-year project investigates, tests and refines a comprehensive set of conjectures about school and district support structures that enhance the effectiveness of teacher development interventions in mathematics. The project involves middle schools in four urban school districts that have partnered with the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh and has both a formal hypothesis-testing component and a design research component. One outcome of the project is an implementation support framework that identifies key support structures, explains why they are important and illustrates how their development can be accomplished.

Project Report

The Middle School Mathematics and the Institutional Setting of Teaching (MIST) study bridged the divide in educational research between studies of policy implementation in school districts and investigations of the role of professional development in the development of high-quality mathematics instruction. The study demonstrates the importance of framing large-scale instructional improvement as a process of organizational as well as teacher learning while simultaneously highlighting that issues of content have far-reaching implications for the school and district instructional improvement. Working in partnership with the leaders of four large urban school districts, researchers from Vanderbilt University refined and tested a comprehensive set of strategies for improving the quality of math teaching on a large scale. These strategies encompass instructional materials, teacher professional development, mathematics coaches who support teachers in their schools, school instructional leadership, and district leadership. By using a mixed-methods approach, the researchers were able to look across a large longitudinal data set to refine conjectures about these strategies and their impact on classroom instruction. The MIST project exemplifies a new interventionist genre of research in which organizational design is at the service of large-scale instructional improvement efforts in mathematics education. Research of this type generates useful theoretical knowledge about the relationships between the school and district settings in which teachers work, the instructional practices they develop in those settings, and their students’ mathematical learning. The MIST project made substantial contributions to the field of educational research a developing a methodological approach that can be used by educational researchers who seek to build similar partnerships with school districts aimed at the system-wide improvement of mathematics instruction. Project findings and process documentation will enable future researchers to anticipate and respond to some of the difficulties in forging reciprocal partnerships with school districts, whose changing natures require strategic planning and coordination of data collection and analysis. The MIST project also developed a number of measures and analytical tools for assessing constructs central to the project’s hypotheses and conjectures. The surveys and interview protocols developed by the MIST team fill a gap in currently available instrumentation. During the instrument development process, MIST researchers conducted an extensive review of instruments available in the fields of mathematics education and policy and leadership. This review revealed the disparity between research techniques and tools in policy research and research in mathematics education. Most instruments developed by mathematics educators focus on the nature of teachers’ instructional practices and the nature of the classroom learning environment, but do not attempt to document the school and district settings in which mathematics classrooms as located. Conversely, instruments developed by researchers in policy and leadership attend to aspects of the institutional setting of teaching but do not take a position on what counts as high-quality instruction and do not take account of issues of content. The instruments developed in MIST build on research on mathematics teaching and learning while simultaneously attending to the school and district setting of teaching. Furthermore, project researchers have developed associated coding schemes that will enable other researchers to assess teachers’, coaches’, and principals’ expertise with greater precision – such as participants’ Vision of High Quality Mathematics Instruction (VHQMI) and Vision of Students’ Mathematical Capabilities (VSMC). Finally, analyses conducted on MIST data have yielded several significant results pertaining to the work of teachers and the school and district settings in which they work. These findings address the influence of curriculum, instructional leadership, and instructional coaching on the quality of teachers’ classroom practice. Ongoing analyses of MIST data are investigating the relationship between district and school leaders’ visions of high-quality mathematics instruction and the design and implementation of supports for school leaders, coaches, and teachers to improve their practices. These findings are sensitive to the challenges typically faced by urban districts including a high proportion of students who are currently struggling in mathematics, high teacher turnover, and limited financial resources. The findings therefore provide concrete guidance to leaders of other districts as they formulate instructional improvement policies that take into account the strengths, constraints, and needs of their schools. In addition, the findings provide direction for future research on improving the quality of teaching in mathematics (and other subject matter areas) on a large scale. Project website: http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/departments/tl/teaching_and_learning_research/mist/index.php

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL)
Application #
0554535
Program Officer
Patricia S. Wilson
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2006-06-01
Budget End
2012-05-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$2,765,114
Indirect Cost
Name
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Nashville
State
TN
Country
United States
Zip Code
37240