Phase III
Years 4-6 (fall 2016-spring 2019) constitute the third phase of the IDReAM project. The purposes of the project in these three years are to continue to study:
- How to differentiate instruction for cognitively diverse middle school students;
- How teachers learn to differentiate instruction;
- How differentiating instruction impacts students and teachers affectively, as well as students’ reasoning;
- How students’ rational number knowledge and algebraic reasoning are related.
During Phase III Amy, the classroom teacher, and research team members are co-conducting design experiments with whole classrooms of middle school students. Amy has co-taught two different units with classroom teachers from the Teacher Study Group in which we planned together to differentiate instruction. This way of doing research is about using teaching as a method of investigation into teaching and learning. Using teaching as a method of investigation requires developing conjectures about students’ ways of thinking and classroom instruction and making tests of those conjectures in the process of teaching. So, each of these design experiments required gathering initial data about students via written assessments and interviews, as well as follow-up assessments and interviews.
From summer 2017 onward we have been analyzing data from Phase III (see Analysis in Progress).
