Collaborative Research: Supporting Teachers to Develop Equitable Mathematics Instruction Through Rubric-based Coaching

Creating supportive middle school mathematics learning spaces that foster students' self-efficacy and mathematics learning is a critical need in the United States. This need is particularly urgent for mathematics classrooms with students who have been historically marginalized in such spaces. While many instructional improvement efforts have focused on broadening access to mathematical ideas, fewer efforts have paid explicit attention to the ways instructional practices may serve to marginalize students.

Supporting teachers in identifying and refining their equitable mathematics instructional practices is a persistent challenge. This project brings together a successful mathematics rubric-based coaching model (MQI Coaching) and an empirically developed observation tool focused on equity-focused instructional practices, the Equity and Access Rubrics for Mathematics Instruction (EAR-MI).

The project's work integrates the EAR-MI rubrics into the MQI Coaching model with 24 middle grades mathematics coaches supporting 72 teachers at grades 5-8. The project measures the effects of the coaching model on teachers' beliefs and instructional practices and on students' mathematical achievement and sense of belonging in mathematics. The project also investigates how teachers' attitudes and beliefs impact their participation and what teachers take away from engagement with the coaching model.

The project makes use of a delayed-treatment experimental design to investigate effects on teacher beliefs and practices and student achievement and sense of belonging. A cohort of 14 coaches are randomly selected to participate in the coaching in Years 2 and 3, with the remaining 10 coaches assigned to a business-as-usual model in Year 2 and engaging in the training in Year 3.

Coaches engage in a 4-day summer training to become acquainted with the model with coaching cycles and follow-up meetings during the school year. Each coach will engage teachers in 8-10 coaching cycles in treatment years. Data on the nature of the coaching includes logs and surveys from the coaches.

Teachers submit surveys related to their beliefs and practices and two lessons each at the start and end of the academic year for analysis. Student assessment data, course grades, and administrative data, combined with survey data from students on classroom belonging and perceptions of ability and confidence in mathematics, are used to describe student outcomes.

Teacher outcomes are captured through the analysis of classroom video, surveys about ethnic-racial identity and racial attitudes, beliefs about students and instruction, and beliefs about and efficacy for culturally responsive teaching. The project uses a set of survey measures with established reliability and validity, adapting some instruments to include specific indicators related to the equity and access rubrics.

Analysis of the data uses a multi-level model accounting for the clustering of teachers within schools and students within classrooms and schools.

This project is funded by the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The DRK-12 program seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools.

Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.