Date of Award

Spring 1995

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

Education

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

Major Thomas Schram

Abstract

The primary emphasis of this study was to broaden the understanding of data collected in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) Recognizing and Recording Reform in Mathematics Education (R$\sp3$M) project in order to more fully clarify the processes by which reform in mathematics education was occurring across five high school sites. A secondary emphasis was to develop a model of doing cross-case analyses and identifying those methodological elements and linkages that could be applied generally in large-scale studies of this sort.

R$\sp3$M documenters obtained data that resulted from interviews of mathematics teachers, administrators, and students; classroom observations; and documents collected at the sites. That data and summary reports of documenters constituted the data pool for this study. There were six guiding issues from the R$\sp3$M project which determined the clusters used in this study: the mathematical vision held by people at each high school; the pedagogical vision held, relative to mathematics, by the people in the site; the contextual features which influenced, both positively and negatively, curriculum reform in mathematics at each site; the influences on students of the mathematical and pedagogical practices; the evolution of the reform efforts at each high school; and the impact of the NCTM Standards on these efforts of reform.

The study consisted of immersion in the data through four levels of analysis and reduction: coding of data, sorting and summarizing of data by codes for each school, summarizing the data by clusters for each school, and analyzing each of the six clusters across the five cases of the study. The coding and sorting of data were facilitated by the computer program HyperResearch (Version 1.55).

Some of the findings center on how pedagogical shifts by teachers influenced the way students do and understand mathematics; how teachers learned and adapted when confronted by the complexities involved in mathematics reform efforts; the different ways in which the Standards influenced the efforts of reform; the possible value of the cross-case methodology to similar studies; and issues raised in study and the implications of those issues for the field of mathematics education.

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