Research paper
Teachers' perspectives of changes in their practice during a technology in mathematics education research project

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.01.022Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Explores teacher change using digital technology for teaching mathematics over three years.

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    Ongoing support necessary, but not sufficient for sustained teacher change.

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    Knowledge, beliefs, and practices impact on potential for teacher change.

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    Digital technology use in teaching mathematics remains a challenge.

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    Transformative power of digital technologies for learning mathematics often unrecognized.

Abstract

Teachers' perception of changes to their teaching practice, with respect to digital technology use in secondary school mathematics, during their participation in a research project are reported. Two case studies are presented of teacher perspectives illustrative of the range of perceived changes teachers made to their practice and positions along the ‘path of change’ during their participation in the project. Participating in a project supportive of teacher change and resulting in perception of substantial change was necessary, but not sufficient, to meet the goal of transformative use of digital technologies to increase the level of cognitive demand experienced by students.

Section snippets

Introduction and background

Many teachers around the world participate in research projects most often as the ones being researched or vicariously through teaching those who are being researched. In some projects, however, in particular design experiments (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004), teachers are seen as co-researchers with others who are from outside the schooling environment. As Bielaczyc notes, “design research methodology is meant to provide a means of constructing robust theories of why certain practices are

Design research

Within the project, the methodology used comes under the umbrella of a design research experiment (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012, Feuer et al., 2003:; McKenney & Reeves, 2014). Design experiment approaches “include significant efforts to change educational practices, generally with some innovative materials as well as a reorganisation of the activities of teaching and learning. They also include significant efforts to understand processes of learning and teaching in the situations where the new

Data collection

Data related to technology use by teachers and their students were collected over the three years of the project. Data collection methods included teacher interviews, questionnaires administered in the final months of the project, classroom observation (including task implementation), and field notes detailing participation in project meetings. Interviews with teachers included broad project-based questions focusing attention on what changes the teachers intended to implement in the future and

Case studies

In their seminal work, Windows on mathematical meanings, Noss and Hoyles (1996) developed caricatures of the teachers in their study. Each caricature represented clusters of teachers, synthesising the “views, attitudes, and practices of its members” (p. 188). Each caricature is authentic, but represents a number of participants, not an individual. The caricatures model the complexity of the data, focusing attention by exaggerating some points and ignoring others. A similar approach is being

Discussion: transformative practices

Pru had only moved to experimentation (decision point 10) having taken the plunge and dared to try some new activities. However, it appeared that Pru had no intention of progressing beyond this point, having no commitment to changing the approach to teaching and learning in a technology-rich teaching and learning environment (TRTLE). In an interview early in the project, she indicated that she perceived her mathematics teaching to be too skills-based, but she found it difficult to change. At

Conclusion

In this study the link between teacher perception of their use of digital technologies in their mathematics classrooms during a three year project was explored. Teacher responses to questions regarding (1) their position on their style of teaching, (2) their position on their style of teaching of function by integrating technology into their teaching of Year 9 and 10 mathematics students, and (3) the extent and purpose to which various technology types were used; were analyzed and presented

Acknowledgements

This study was supported under Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (LP0453701). The author was a doctoral student at The University of Melbourne when these data were collected. The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council. The author would like to acknowledge that the writing of this paper has been supported by a Publication Grant from The University of Melbourne.

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