Browsing by Subject "mathematics"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Investigating Young Children’s Attitudes toward Mathematics: Improved Measurement and the Relation to Achievement
    (2018-05) Kiss, Allyson
    Researchers in the field of school psychology have recently emphasized the influence of different academic enablers that may influence how students achieve and perform in school. In this literature, attitudes have not yet received much attention as an enabler. However, students as young as pre-kindergarten enter school with predisposed attitudes towards mathematics. These attitudes may influence their engagement, persistence and performance in mathematics. Evidence also suggests that mathematics performance in kindergarten and first grade can predict performance later in life. Thus, it is important for school psychologists and educators to understand how students perceive their ability and perceive the task of mathematics to help students build their competence to become later successful learners. Understanding the earlier development of these attitudes may help foster more positive perceptions and mathematics learning environments for all students. The purpose of this two-study dissertation was to examine attitudes toward mathematics among young children in kindergarten and first grade. Specifically, the purpose of Study 1 was to develop an assessment instrument to measure attitudes toward mathematics for students in kindergarten and first grade and to examine the reliability and validity evidence for potential use in a school setting. Further, Study 2 aimed to investigate the extent to which different attitudes such as perceived self-competence beliefs, enjoyment, and importance were related to student mathematics achievement as measured by teacher ratings and standardized mathematics assessments. This study is first in an emerging line of inquiry to understand how attitudes influence various achievement outcomes for young children, and, thereby identify if, how, and to what effect attitudes of young children might be targeted for intervention.
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    LGBTQ Secondary Mathematics Educators: Their Identities and Their Classrooms
    (2018-06) Whipple, Kyle
    This qualitative research study is an investigation of mathematics teacher identity with gay and lesbian identity in two high school mathematics teachers. I use the conceptual framework of queer theory in order to demonstrate a deconstruction of the binaries and heteronormativity often associated with mathematics. This research is a case study that will contribute to the understanding of gay and lesbian high school mathematics teachers with a focus on their identities and their classrooms.
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    Minneapolis Seed Mathematics Specialist Project: The Pilot 1970-71 Willard School, Minneapolis Public Schools
    (Minneapolis Seed Mathematics Specialist Project: The Pilot 1970-71 Willard School, Minneapolis Public Schools., 1971) Post, Thomas R.
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    Supporting Standards-Based Teaching and Learning in Mathematics and Science: Lessons from the Minnesota TIMSS Data
    (Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, 1999-08) Lawrenz, Frances; Huffman, Douglas; Palmer, Elisabeth
    More and more school districts are consciously collecting and using a wide variety of data to inform their decision- making processes. This report is an effort to support Minnesota school districts in using data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to assess the extent to which they are engaging in and supporting standards-based education in these two subject areas. This report is intended for teachers, curriculum coordinators, school and district administrators, and policy- makers who wish to systematically examine how we educate our children in science and mathematics. It is It is not possible to look at our educational practices and outcomes as cause and effect. Rather, the data are intended to highlight the relationships between how we educate our children and what they learn. Introduction Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement 3 organized into five main sections, each of which begins with a summary of the Minnesota TIMSS data on key issues in science and mathematics education at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. At the end of each section are questions to guide educators in reflecting upon their practices at the classroom, school, and district levels and the extent to which these practices promote standards-based teaching and learning.
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    The Time-Suturing Technologies of Northern Song Musicology
    (2019-06) Christensen, Lars
    Scholars of ritual music in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) keenly sensed a temporal distance from the ancient sages that manifested as a divergence from canonical norms. To maintain a distinctive intellectual heritage and counterbalance outward-facing political and economic conditions, they located cultural identity in the idealized past. Given the overwhelming discursive importance of music, ministers and rulers alike sought to restore powerful practices and thereby transcend the boundedness of the dynastic cycle. Since their principal sources about antiquity, the textual classics, provided limited practical information about music, scholars had to supplement them with technologies grounded in linguistics, mathematics, and visualizations, which I explore in this dissertation. First, I observe how ritual music prescriptions were constituted in allusive or even paronomastic scholarly language. The Confucian principle of the rectification of names, stressing an enduring concord between words and reality, gave scholars rhetorical tools with which to critique at once society and music practices. Three case studies, treating the symbolism of the pentatonic scale, the discourse of harmony in the ritual bell-knife, and the implications of pitch metaphors, illustrate how reformers interrelated sociological commonplaces and concrete reform measures. Second, contrasting parallel mathematized and unmathematized music discourses, I trace the evolving relationship between mathematical and classical learning, showing how by Northern Song times mathematics could signify invariance. This discursive adoption afforded music reformers a precision that dovetailed elegantly with the royal prerogative of standardizing metrological systems. A case study explores the resilience of the numerical measurement of the standard pitch pipe across time and the overlapping metonymy that made it resistant to metrical reorganization. Finally, I contextualize the turn toward visual epistemology in the Northern Song in terms of classical precedent, the explosion of woodblock printing, and nascent archaeology. I compare two kinds of musical images, cosmological diagrams and prescriptive illustrations of ancient instruments. Though quite distinct in assumptions, intellectual pedigree, and style, both image types demonstrate a technology surpassing the power of text to organize, preserve, and disseminate orthodox musical practice. These technologies allowed the scholars to suture time, bringing them into more direct contact with their own exalted history.
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    Transforming the University: Preliminary Recommendations of the College Design: Science/Engineering Task Force
    (University of Minnesota, 2006-03-27) Neuhauser, Claudia; Bates, Frank; Bernlohr, David
    This task force concluded that the sciences and engineering at the University of Minnesota have a unique structure that is progressive and ideally suited for greater collaboration across department boundaries. Therefore, we find no reason to recommend change to the current organizational structure of IT or CBS.