The question I am going to ask is whether male or female students are engaged more in math class. Throughout years of education, there has been speculation that males perform better in math than females, even when science has proved this notion to be false. Engagement can be defined as student participation in math activities, answering teacher questions, and participating in class discussion. I find this important because there are two different theories about both genders in math class that need to be investigated. I believe it will be important to my teaching because it will allow me to teach with different strategies. Both genders can achieve great things in math, so there is no need to have bias favoring one gender over the other. There is no reason to why such an ideal exists, but it has carried on as years have passed. It is the job of the teacher to ignore such notions and to teach all students equally and with equity as well. My research question will dive into student engagement in math because it is of interest to me. I conducted a similar research question in my teaching science class, and the results were intriguing.This study could be helpful to not only pre-service teachers, but teachers who are currently in the field. Also, educational research is important to advancing the field of education.
The place where I will conduct this research will be located at an urban public school with a heterogenous population. There should be enough evidence to collect from the plethora of students that attend the school, I plan to record ten pages of field notesand a full time on task chart. Students from all backgrounds attend the school, so the data that will be collected should be diversified. Students that are Black and White, and from various ethnic backgrounds are in the school. However, I do not need this factor when doing my research. I am not looking at the ethnicity of the participants, just what biological gender they are. I foresee no problem in the data not being quality enough because of the sufficient amount of data that can be collected. Students will be male or female, and their identities have not been decided yet, but it will not matter because they will be omitted anyways for the sake of privacy. In terms of a description of the physical setting of the school, it is two floors. There are a lot of colors in the school and the colors are warm and happy. Why this aspect is important for my project, that remains unknown, but none the less it is discussed here. The teacher is White male, so that is a change up from the usual teaching demographic of having a women teacher. The teacher teaches math, social studies, and Spanish. The fact he teaches Spanish is unique to me. I did not learn Spanish when I was in fifth grade, so that is a change in education that has occurred in a span of 20+ years. The school may have a large Spanish speaking population, which may explain why the teacher is teaching them to speak Spanish. However, this is just speculation, because I do not know for sure if there is a large Spanish speaking population. A lot of this information is not vital to my project.
How I plan to collect my date is by going to my field placement fifteen visits for two hours a piece. It would be hard to do interviews with students because of my limited time, so I will listen to student discussion and jot down their discussions. My field notes will be my own thoughts on the teacher’s teaching and the engagement of students in the classroom. I will be creating a time on task chart that will focus on two students; one male and one female. Out of a span of 30 minutes, I will observe how long the students are engaged. If the student is engaged, I will put a 1 (1 for 1 minute on task) or a 0 (0 minutes out of 1 minute on task). I did a similar method of data collection in my teaching science class and found it to be an interesting way to go about collecting data. The classroom artifacts could be three male’s assessment and three female’s assessment and comparing the two. The only flaw with this is that the performances of students on different assessments could influence the data, which could create a problem. More specifically, there could be outside factors that effect the students willingness to be engaged on that particular day, which could influence the data. That is why the best way to go about collecting data for this project would be using multiple participants that are either male or female. In the next draft, I will be discussing other forms of data that will be important for this project. Looking at scholarly articles would be important to this topic. As discussed earlier in the draft, this is a topic of debate. It is tough to collect a lot of data at field since I want to build a relationship with my students. By sitting at a table just collecting data, it is difficult to build a relationship with the students of the class. Also, it is important to foster positive relationships with students in field as a pre-service teacher, because you are only there for a short time. Especially when you have to plan and conduct a lesson, if the students have no idea who you are, then it makes for an odd lesson. Getting to know the students and then collecting data could be an appropriate course of action.
- The comments influenced my writing process to fix the errors I had committed and rethink the focuses of my drafts. The girls in my group were essential to me fixing my drafts because they added perspective on the topic that I had no viewed before and made me think about what differences there are in the engagement of males and female students in math class. Also, I had a lot grammatical errors or information that was not needed that they corrected me on, and I therefore took it out. For example, I was providing information about the teacher that was no needed and probably took away from the quality of the draft. The feedback I received helped me narrow down the focus of my research question and make it more specific. I found their input invaluable because they gave me a ton of great feedback that allowed the draft to take shape.
- The theory, when laid out, is that boys do better in math because they are naturally better at it. When I researched this topic, the article Current Research Gender Differences in Math by Colleen Ganley and Sarah Lubienski highlighted the discussion I want to research.
There were a lot of factors that influenced the performances of males and females in math, but those can be discussed in the limitations part of my project. The stereotype is that boys perform better and math and the article highlights this by stating “Recently, researchers found that girls’ math achievement is lower if they have a female teacher who is anxious about math. This may be because these girls are picking up on gender stereotypes. In addition, some of our own research suggests that when boys and girls have the same math performance and behaviors in math class, teachers perceive that the boys are better at math, and that this “differential rating” of boys and girls contributes to gender gaps in math performance” (Ganley & Lubienski). By diving into this stereotype, I am doing myself a service in enlightening myself on what stereotypes exists and how I can combat and eliminate such issues such as anxiety and self-esteem in math.
Ganley, C., & Lubienski, S. (2016, May 9). Current Research on Gender Differences in
Math. Retrieved October 22, 2019, from https://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathematics/Blog/Current-Research-on-Gender-Differences-in-Math/.
- The limitations of a time on task chart is the ability to seriously focus on two students from each gender. To counter this limitation, I plan on being zoned in on those four students. The other limitation could be outside factors that influenced the engagement of those four students. To counter these limitations though, I plan on choosing students who have consistently shown either being on or off task. I conducted a time on task chart for my teaching science class last semester and actually had to do 8 students total (4 males; 4 females). The project was identical to this one, so I really have no problems with picking two male and two female students. By using a Time on Task chart, it is an effective way to put engagement into a quantitative representation. I would not know another way to find a strategy that is similar in terms of predicted success and actual effectiveness. Also, when I looked up Intervention strategies for one of my course assignments, one effective intervention was giving students feedback on a strategy being used to aid in their development as a student, so a Time on Task chart would provide such feedback because a student could see how their correlation in their engagement connects to their academic success in that particular class.
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