$525,000 to Professor Rebecca Ambrose

Professor Rebecca Ambrose received a four-year grant for $525,000 from the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) to strengthen mathematics teaching and learning in an elementary school district in North Sacramento.

Building on an earlier collaboration with K-2 teachers in the district also funded by CPEC, Ambrose and a team of researchers and educators from UC Davis, the Sacramento County Office of Education, and Robla School District, will provide professional development to kindergarten through sixth grade mathematics teachers throughout the district to deepen their understanding of mathematics and improve their students’ academic performance.

By giving teachers a venue for sharing their expertise with one another, the project will help teachers sharpen their skills in mathematics teaching. The teachers watch videotapes of one another’s students solving problems and listen to audio tapes recorded in their classroom, to examine the many different ways that children solve problems and the challenges that arise when students try to communicate about their mathematical thinking.

“By focusing teachers on mathematical explanation and problem solving, teachers gain a deeper understanding of the mathematics they teach and are able to explain it with clarity,” said Ambrose. “We chose an emphasis on explanation because explanations promote mathematical learning for both the explainer and his classmates. Explainers benefit from the additional cognitive processing that explanations require and listeners benefit from hearing explanations in more familiar vernacular.”

This is particularly important in the Robla district, where a large number of students are English learners who often struggle with complex word problems and where the district recently adopted a new mathematics textbook that emphasizes word problems and mathematical explanation. Professor Robert Bayley, one of the collaborators on the project, will help the teachers to consider the linguistic demands of story problems in their text and on standardized tests, so they can better prepare their English Learners to make sense of these problems.

The professional development initiative is unique because rarely are programs able to use examples involving children in the classrooms where the teachers work. In addition, the project has an archive of videotape of children from the district going back three years. Some of the children who are now in third grade have been videotaped solving problems for the past three years. “They are our math stars, and the teachers learn a lot from watching them work. We look forward to continue to follow their progress and hope they will inspire the teachers to build on the success of their colleagues in facilitating children’s problem solving abilities.”

“We have seen in our earlier work that by sharing their experiences and observing their students’ growing understanding of math, teachers begin to experience collective efficacy,” said Ambrose. Once individuals in the group see the success of their peers, they are more likely to feel successful and to continue their efforts to work with each other and their students to strengthen mathematical reasoning and performance.