After conversations with my colleagues and reviewing notes from the teaching week, I have a few items that I have spent the most time thinking about and wondering about.
The idea and expectation that all teachers have the responsibility to teach academic vocabulary. The way vocabulary words can cross over multiple classes and have many meanings means that all teachers, regardless of their content area should be supporting and fostering students ability to listen and speak in academic settings. When students increase reading skills, learning engagement will follow. There are so many students who are lacking grade level reading abilities, and how that can affect all classes they engage in, because reading is the basis of many educational endeavors. Speaking specifically about math cognition the need students have to be able to recognize a word and symbol meaning, be able to read tables, graphs and diagrams is vital to understanding the content. Being a strong mathematician requires understanding of specialized math terms like coordinate plane, but also being able to relate that understanding to reading a city map or vice versa. In the realm of understanding how vocabulary and reading comprehension can influence a students ability to answer math word problems, a recent word problem that gave some of my students a hard time was, “What integer represents a gain of 7 yards?” This question was assessing the students comprehension of absolute value. Students must understand the meaning of the word gain in this question. The correct answer was 7 or +7. Before the assessment, scaffolding included students brainstorming vocabulary words that could indicate positive or negative. We reviewed increase vs. decrease, up vs. down, gain vs lost, withdrawal vs deposit, jump vs fall and more. The students came up with other ideas that were insightful as well as a little confusing (more vs less and give vs take). We had class conversations regarding how to identify the words to focus on when encountering a word problem, how to isolate the word (underline it, highlight it, or rewrite it in the work space). We also talked about how re-reading the word problem and thinking about the situation as a whole might help decode what the words mean. The other question in the assessment that had students confused was very simple, but many still had problems, “The temperature in a city was 58 degrees at noon. By 5:00 the temperature had changed by 6 degrees. Give two ways the temperature could have changed and plot them on the number line.” A number of students reported that the temperature was 6 degrees by 5:00. The information about the change in temperature was not understood. Some students had taken the advice to locate the numbers in the word problem (58 and 6) and, not understanding that change could have meant an increase or decrease in temperature, reported that the end temperature was 6 degrees. The mathematical problem was quite simple, and all my students have proven to me that they can add and subtract. If they are presented with a problem 58-6 or 58 +6 they could accurately solve the problem. When words, sentences and multi step problems are introduced, many can not comprehend the vocabulary. In the research done by Skinner, Pearce, and Barrera regarding teacher perceptions of student difficulties, 45% of the 70 teachers in the study reported that Reading/Understanding the Problem was the barrier to accuracy, while only 1% said computation was the barrier. This is very similar to my perceptions of what is keeping some of my students from proficiency. Additional resources refer to the fact that students face complex word problems during testing. The article by Pierce and Fontaine reveal that instructing students in math vocabulary is best given in language students can understand, and multiple examples of how the word is typically used. Furthermore, students should participate in classroom lessons that delve into a deep understanding of the word’s meaning. I would like my action research to be an investigation into how integration of vocabulary strategies, lessons that ensure students are speaking and listening (podcasts or voicethread) using specific mathematical vocabulary, into mathematics instruction affect students accuracy with word problems. With innovation in mind, a quantitative study of test scores from either the Math Inventory test given, or another test given before a unit of study (pre-test) will compare the post test scores. Qualitative data will come from interviews of both teachers and administrators and possibly students.
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