\n<\/p>\n
Remainder. Product. Algorithm. Ordered pair.<\/p>\n
Seemingly jargony words and phrases like these, referring to specific math concepts, might seem complex for elementary school students to grasp. But teachers who use them regularly are more likely to boost student math scores, new research finds.<\/p>\n
The paper is one of the largest-scale studies to examine this practice\u2014and it draws a link between specific instructional moves and teacher effectiveness. <\/p>\n
The study, from researchers at Harvard University, the University of Maryland College Park, and Stanford University, used natural-language-processing techniques\u2014a form of artificial intelligence\u2014to analyze more than 1,600 transcripts of 4th and 5th grade math lessons from the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness Transcript Dataset, a bank collected from 317 classrooms across four districts between 2010-2013.<\/p>\n
In these districts, schools assigned students to classrooms following business-as-usual procedures during the first two years of data collection. But during the third year, schools grouped students randomly, and researchers assigned teachers to each class. That design allowed the researchers in the new study to examine the effects of being assigned to one teacher over another in the third year.<\/p>\n
They found that students assigned to teachers who used more mathematical vocabulary in their lessons made greater progress than students who were assigned to teachers who used less. Math-vocabulary use alone predicted about half of the variation among those teachers whose students improved the most, and those whose students learned the least.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the teachers who are using more mathematical vocabulary that are the more effective teachers, on average,\u201d said Zachary Himmelsbach, an investigator\/instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital\u2019s psychiatry department and Harvard Medical School, and the lead author on the study. \u201cIt provides this strong predictive signal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cImportantly, it\u2019s not necessarily the case that it is the use of vocabulary itself that causes the improvements,\u201d he added, as a caveat to the findings. \u201cIt could be that, or some portion of it could be that. But it also could be that teachers who use more mathematical vocabulary are doing other things as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using math-specific vocabulary\u2014saying \u201cproduct\u201d when teaching multiplication, for example, instead of something like \u201cwhat you get when you multiply two numbers together\u201d\u2014is widely regarded as a best practice in math instruction.<\/p>\n
The Institute of Education Sciences\u2019 practice guides recommend it for elementary and middle school students who are struggling in math, and teachers have said vocabulary knowledge is key for students to succeed with standards and curricula that increasingly rely on problem-solving and explaining solutions. (IES is part of the U.S. Department of Education.) <\/p>\n
In part, previous math research has theorized, vocabulary knowledge opens a portal to conceptual understanding, said Himmelsbach. Knowing what the radius of a circle is, for example, can provide a foundation for applying the concept of a radius elsewhere in math, especially as problems become more abstract, he said.<\/p>\n
Put simply, \u201cthey need to know the words to be able to understand the concepts,\u201d said Robin Anderson, an 8th grade math teacher at Andover Middle School in Andover, Kan.<\/p>\n
Schoolwide, Andover uses a vocabulary routine to teach new terms related to core content: Teachers define the word, give examples, and then ask students to do the same. \u201cWe believe as a school, if we can teach them more vocab words in math and science and reading, they\u2019re going to start to understand things on a deeper level,\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a practice she uses regularly in her math class. This year those words include \u201ccoefficient,\u201d \u201cinteger,\u201d \u201clinear pair,\u201d \u201csupplementary,\u201d and \u201ccomplementary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Previous research in math education has formed a \u201ctheoretical bedrock\u201d that supports teachers\u2019 use of math vocabulary, Himmelsbach said. But mostly that research hinged on small case studies, examining the practice of one teacher, or a small group. The new study shows on a larger scale that teachers who use more math vocabulary are consistently more effective than teachers who use less.<\/p>\n
Teachers with more mathematical knowledge themselves were more likely to use math vocabulary, but other individual characteristics\u2014such as how many years of experience teachers had\u2014didn\u2019t explain stronger math-vocabulary usage.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, though having a teacher who used more math-specific vocabulary led to higher student scores, it didn\u2019t make students more likely to use that vocabulary themselves.<\/p>\n
Beyond offering insight into effective math instructional practices, Himmelsbach said, the study also serves as an example of what new artificial intelligence technologies could reveal about what makes for good teaching.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy looking at a much more granular picture of what\u2019s happening in the classroom, we were able to construct a measure that is a strong predictor. We need to keep doing this,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be wonderful to have a nationally representative sample of classroom lessons,\u201d he added, similar to how the National Assessment of Educational Progress captures a sample of achievement.<\/p>\n
Himmelsbach said that such a repository should be anonymized, used for research purposes only, and not connected to accountability for teachers or schools.<\/p>\n
Still, the idea gives Anderson, the math teacher, pause.<\/p>\n
She wouldn\u2019t want the takeaway from research like this to be that teacher effectiveness is tied to one practice\u2014no matter how powerful research found that practice to be. She instead favors a more holistic definition of teacher quality.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes,\u201d she said, \u201cit\u2019s more the rapport you have with students.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remainder. Product. Algorithm. Ordered pair. Seemingly jargony words and phrases like these, referring to specific math concepts, might seem complex for elementary school students to grasp. But teachers who use them regularly are more likely to boost student math scores, new research finds. The paper is one of the largest-scale studies to examine this practice\u2014and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[9844,585,4693,393,436,22040],"class_list":{"0":"post-42029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-affects","9":"tag-learning","10":"tag-math","11":"tag-student","12":"tag-teachers","13":"tag-vocabulary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}