These summaries are of research papers presented at the Day Conference on June 2024, Loughborough University. Full papers are available at http://www.bsrlm.org.uk/publications/proceedings-of-day-conference.
Contents
Primary Mathematics Teachers’ Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Single-sex Classes in Saudi Arabia
Majed Alanazi
University of Nottingham
This research proposal investigates the integration of Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) in primary mathematics education in Saudi Arabia, specifically within single-sex classrooms for Years 1-3. The study aims to understand how factors such as gender, teaching experience, and training influence teachers’ use of IWBs, particularly considering recent educational reforms like the “childhood programme.” This reform, which introduced boys being taught by female teachers, offers a unique opportunity to examine the adaptation of teaching practices in this context. Prior research on IWB usage in Saudi Arabia has been broad and general, with limited focus on specific subjects like mathematics. By concentrating on how IWBs support math instruction, this proposal fills an important gap, providing insight into the practical outcomes of technological integration in Saudi primary classrooms. Furthermore, this research will address how gender dynamics shape IWB usage, especially under the new policy shift. The study will adopt a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative surveys will be distributed to around 300 mathematics teachers in Arar city, exploring patterns in attitudes, training, and perceived barriers. To deepen these insights, qualitative semi-structured interviews with 10 teachers (5 male, 5 female) and classroom observations of 4 teachers will be conducted. Special attention will be given to how female teachers manage classrooms with both genders. Additionally, the study will consider emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), which can complement IWBs by enhancing student engagement and understanding in mathematics lessons. This research proposal aims to offer recommendations for improving technology integration in primary classrooms, guiding both practitioners and policymakers in their efforts to enhance learning outcomes in Saudi Arabia’s evolving educational landscape.
Mathematics GCSE resit students: heterogeneous patterns of affect, participation and attainment
Despoina Boli1 and Jennie Golding1
1University College London Institute of Education
GCSE Resit students in England are a subset of those who have reached the age of 16 without achieving a ‘standard’ (Grade 4+) pass in GCSE Mathematics. In recent years, except during the pandemic, such students have comprised around 30% of each cohort. They are therefore re-sitting the assessment, often as a condition of funding in post-16 education. We highlight the diverse and gendered characteristics of these students in relation to mathematics, drawing on two sources of data: a mixed methods study of students studying GCSE Mathematics in each of two Further Education colleges, focused on accounts of their engagement with GCSE word problems as a ‘threshold skill’ in GCSE Mathematics; and recent years’ GCSE Mathematics post-16 participation and attainment data in England. Taken together, these illuminate gendered and experience-related patterns of affect, participation and attainment within students resitting GCSE Mathematics.
Nicola Bretscher, Jill Adler, Tim Clark, Suman Ghosh, Piers Saunders
Institute of Education, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society
This report details an ongoing investigation into how a framework for teaching mathematics serves as a resource for developing a shared language between teacher educators and pre-service teachers about mathematics teaching. The purpose of introducing such a framework is to make more explicit and transparent elements of mathematics teaching which we believe, based on our understanding of mathematics education research, are central to improving the quality of pre-service teachers’ instructional practices. By making these elements more explicit and usable, we expect the framework to provide a useful resource for negotiating meaning about what counts as ‘good mathematics teaching’ between teacher educators and pre-service teachers. Drawing on notions of situated abstraction and resource transparency, we discuss initial findings based on analysis of course artefacts from two telling cases selected to illuminate whether and how they use elements of the framework to describe their mathematics teaching.
Use of affect to identify pupil active goals formation during a Key Stage 2 mathematics lesson
Elizabeth Hall
University of Brighton
Motivation in the form of goals is often considered a long-term trait. However, there is growing awareness of the presence of in-the-moment, or active goals during mathematics lessons. The affective domain permits identification of changing emotions during mathematics lessons, which I conjecture enables insight into active goal formation. This paper forms part of a PhD study where video stimulated recall interviews occurred with eight 9–10-year-old pupils, across two classes. This paper presents findings for one pupil, David, indicating a change in affective behaviour, resulting in identification of two active goal pathways: The teacher’s pathway for David to adopt cognitive active goals and David’s actual active goal pathway. The pathways indicate David’s active goals at times varied from those of the teacher and include the addition of social cognitive goals. By the end of the mathematics lesson, David had aligned himself with the teacher’s active goals for the lesson.
Cheryl Lloyd and Helen Drury
Purposeful Ventures
The Maths Excellence Fund has been established to increase the number of students who are on track to succeed in A-level maths and beyond, by improving student attainment and progression in maths. Informed by the 2023 Maths Excellence Pathways report, it has a particular focus on socio-economically disadvantaged students with high key stage two attainment, for whom studying maths can unlock significant opportunities. The Fund is supporting programmes that will be led by schools, universities and charities. Each programme will be independently evaluated to better understand which activities might improve student attainment and progress in maths, and to replicate best practice models. This paper focuses on the Fund’s objectives, activities, and evaluation plans.
Jennifer Norris and Andrew Noyes
University of Nottingham
While the importance of mathematics study for 16-18 year olds in England is widely agreed, the means of raising mathematics participation remains a matter of much debate. Using metaphor theory, we explore what aspects of post-16 mathematics participation are highlighted and hidden from the perspectives of three distinct metaphors: the mathematics pipeline, qualification pathways, and portfolios of mathematical competences. National participation data from the National Pupil Database are analysed for A level students in England between 2015/16 and 2020/21 (n = 796,800). Results show substantial differences in the number of A level students that count as participating in post-16 mathematics depending on the metaphor used, from 32% in the mathematics pipeline, to 41% in mathematics pathways, and 84% in mathematical portfolios. Since the different metaphors draw attention to different problems of participation, they also suggest different solutions, meaning that awareness of multiple metaphors is crucial to future policy making.
Primary mastery specialism: from training to the classroom
Jennifer Shearman1, Vivien Townsend1, Alf Coles2, Chris Dale1
National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics1, University of Bristol2
We are engaged in an on-going project to evaluate the impact of Primary Teaching for Mastery Specialist training, on the teachers who attend and also on their students. We aim to understand more about how messages around Mastery are understood by teachers, how they are operationalized in their classrooms, and any impact on students and on those teachers’ facilitation of groups of teachers in their own schools. We draw on Prediger’s “three tetrahedron model” of professional development, to conceptualise the complex relationships between the activities taking place during Mastery training and the activities taking place in teachers’ lessons. We offer a snapshot of our data: a key theme from the first residential training was teachers’ concerns for “fidelity” and we illustrate three different interpretations of what this means.
Jenny Stacey
Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University
Adults return to mathematics learning up to level 2 (GCSE) fully funded by the government. They may return for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons, such as a change of career, a desire to enroll for an undergraduate course at a university, to help children with homework, or to challenge their perceptions of their abilities. This qualitative study was conducted with adults in FE (n=21) using a mixed methods approach. Findings indicate that self-efficacy was a marginally better indicator for examination success than anxiety levels, as judged by responses to attitude scales. However, whilst most learners who displayed higher self-efficacy and lower anxiety than the median average for the group, there were adults who fell into that category who did not pass, and equally those who displayed low self-efficacy and high anxiety who did pass with a grade 4 or better. A larger study of this under-researched group is recommended.