Working Groups

A Working Group provides an opportunity for individuals to come together for a significant period of time to discuss issues pertaining to a particular area of research. We are pleased to announce the following ten working groups (pdf). Click session titles for more details or download the pdf which also includes the names and contact information for the organizers of each working group.

As the title suggests, this Working Group has a dual focus on issues of mathematics teaching and learning and issues of equity and diversity. We have narrowed the topics discussed at the Working Group in 2009, 2010, and 2011, to focus on mathematics teacher education that incorporates issues of race and power. We will be working on developing plans for a series of manuscripts attending to social justice, race, teacher educator racial identity, and supporting prospective teachers in mathematics methods courses to integrate students’ in- and out-of-school mathematics.

The “Developing Investigations of Mathematical Experience” (DIME) Working Group, initiated in 2011, is focused on building a research-based understanding of the interiorized experiential world of idiosyncratic mathematics. Goals of this research are to characterize individual experiences in ways that acknowledge a person’s active and reflective thinking efforts within mathematical contexts linked to emotive dimensions of their lived and living mathematical experiences, in order to inform mathematics teaching practices. To probe these largely unexplored complex domains, we are using both phenomenological and constructivist theories and methods.

Lack of appropriate and adequate mathematical knowledge in elementary teachers is a major concern in mathematics education. This new Working Group aims to explore this issue from multiple, diverse perspectives and hopes that mathematicians and mathematics educators will come together to discuss this topic. At the initial meeting, participants will have an opportunity to share their current research and raise important questions; in the second meeting, the group will identify possible directions for future research; in the third meeting, groups will plan future work together. The long-term goal is to develop an edited book.

The purpose is to identify ways in which teachers and students can use models of mathematical development (learning progressions, trajectories) as part of a formative assessment process. This is the group’s second year. The focus this year is the use of such models to organize curricula and lesson plans around student learning. Participants will identify and explore different ways of using these models to organize lesson plans, pacing guides, and learning activities in support of formative assessment. We will identify interesting research questions that may provide insight into how models of mathematical development might affect teachers’ use of formative assessment.

The purpose of this Working Group is to examine issues related to disability, mathematics, and pedagogy. In particular, participants will focus on how students with mathematics learning disabilities (MLDs) can effectively engage with and learn authentic mathematics content through pedagogical approaches that combine diagnostic assessment with carefully selected tasks, representations, and student-teacher interactions. We invite researchers and educators interested in issues of disability and mathematics to participate.

This Working Group explores tools for and approaches to measuring instructional activities and practices in relation to curriculum use. During the Working Group sessions, three projects present their work regarding tools they developed to measure instruction, in order to facilitate discussions and reflections on different approaches to measuring instructional activities and practices, and teacher capacities needed for effective design and enactment of a lesson. The goals of the Working Group are to generate interaction about instructional activities and practices and the relationship between written and enacted curricula, and to examine and critique tools developed to measure this relationship.

This Working Group gathers researchers interested in representations of practice using any media (video, text, animation, photography) and the role these play in the design of learning environments for teachers (e.g., in the context of methods classes) and the learning that takes place in those environments.

This new Working Group is designed to engage members of PME-NA in the conceptualization and development of a monograph series that will fill a unique niche for mathematics education researchers. Participants will engage in identifying and characterizing the needs of the field, the affordances of new technologies, and the available resources, and focus this conversation on building an infrastructure for the support of (particularly junior) researchers. Outcomes will be a set of recommendations for the design and management of such a monograph series, and an outline of initial volumes in the series, where participant teams are authors of articles.

This Working Group will focus on building an understanding of the use of frameworks, activities, and evidence of the residue of activities in mathematics methods courses. The goal of the group is to develop a research agenda based on a synthesis of existing literature and a plan of work to address gaps. We have begun this process by posing research questions along two inquiry threads: one in which a particular framework is chosen to start with (Framework-Activities-Residue), and another in which an activity is taken as the starting point (Activity-Framework-Residue). Participants will be asked to discuss empirical studies and activities.

The Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Modeling (QRaMM) Working Group is one of three research strands initiated by the Wyoming Institute for the Study and Development of Mathematical Education (WISDOMe). QRaMM brings together researchers from multiple universities across the country to share ideas and conduct research on quantitative reasoning and modeling within an interdisciplinary context. Focusing issues include: (1) middle and high school students’ development of quantitative reasoning and mathematical modeling, (2) creation of QR learning progressions to explain such development, and (3) the impact and interplay of QR and modeling on students’ development in mathematics and science.