Co-Principal Investigator: Rebecca Perry

Purpose: Problem-solving is a central component of mathematics but not one that U.S. students master well. This research team intends to develop and refine English language resources for "structured problem solving" (SPS), an approach to teaching through problem-solving that is successfully used by a broad spectrum of elementary teachers in Japan. The resources will be developed and refined over a 2-year period and tested in Year 3 with a new group of U.S. educators.

Project Activities: In this project, researchers will develop and refine English language resources for the SPS program. The first two years of the project will focus on two successive rounds of development and revision of the SPS program, in collaboration with individual educators (Year 1) and lesson study groups of educators (Year 2). The SPS resources will include resource kits (to be used by lesson study groups or by individual teachers) supported by webinars. During the final year, researchers will test the fully developed SPS program (a resource kit supported by four webinars) with a cohort of upper-grade elementary teachers who did not participate in the development and revision process. Researchers will continue to study how the resources are used as well as their effects on instruction, teacher knowledge, and student problem solving. The project will also develop two measures of teacher pedagogical knowledge, problem-solving orientation and problem-solving practices in instruction. A student problem-solving assessment and coding scheme will begin development in the first year and will be used in the third year pilot study.

Products: Products developed in this project will be a refined set of English language teacher resources for implementing SPS, an approach to teaching through problem-solving used in Japan. These resources will include lesson plans, student assessments, tools to track student progress, videos of model instruction using SPS, and examples of student responses to written assignments. The study will also produce measures of teachers' problem solving orientation and problem-solving practices during instruction and of student beliefs about mathematics. Peer-reviewed publications will also be produced.

Structured Abstract

Setting: This study will take place in elementary schools in different regions of the United States, serving a wide range of students (with respect to urbanicity, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity).

Population: Participants for this study will include upper elementary teachers (Grades 3&ndash:5) and their students. Cohort 1 will include 10 teachers; Cohort 2 will include approximately 36 teachers; Cohort 3 will include 72 teachers (half assigned to the treatment condition and half assigned to a waitlist control condition). Participating teachers will have at least 3 years of experience of teaching grades 3&ndash:5 and will have shown a commitment to improving student learning by joining lesson study groups or through other professional activities. Students from the classrooms of participating teachers will also be included in the study (approximately 2,240 students across three cohorts of participating teachers).

Intervention: The proposed intervention has many aims: (a) provides SPS resources to teachers, (b) supports teachers to engage in repeated cycles of classroom experimentation using these resources, (c) provides opportunities to revise the resources based on their use, and (d) develops a national community of SPS implementers through summer institutes and webinars. The problem-solving orientationwill be derived from the written commentary submitted by teachers with the videos of their lessons. It will be designed to capture the teacher's ideas about mathematical problem-solving experiences that foster student problem-solving capacity. The measure of problem-solving practices will assess the video of teacher lessons for presence of key instructional strategies to support problem-solving. Examples of such strategies include use of blackboard, journals, questioning strategies, and discussion and comparison of student solutions to elicit and promote refinement of student thinking. The measure will also rate the level of task demand of the mathematical task as implemented. The intervention during the pilot study will involve a 1-week Summer Institute; 4-classroom-based assignments during the school-year, each focused on an element of SPS and each requiring participants to submit a lesson video; and 4 webinars, each focused on supporting preparation of one of the assignments, with electronic exchanges prior to and subsequent to the webinar. Electronic contact with project investigators will be supported on an as-needed basis.

Research Design and Methods: Following an iterative design process, the first two years of the project will include two successive rounds of development and revision of the English language SPS program. The first year will include collaboration with individual educators and the second year will include collaboration with lesson study groups. Video of a classroom lesson and artifacts of teacher work (e.g., lesson plans, student work, reflections on their use of resources) will be analyzed and summarized to detect whether the teachers show progress over time. The project team will draw implications from what they see about the type of revisions needed in the professional development program. During the final year, researchers will test the SPS program Version 2 (a resource kit supported by four webinars) with a new cohort of 36 upper-grade elementary teachers and compare them to a randomly assigned control group. Problem-solving outcomes as described above will be quantified and analyzed statistically. Researchers will also continue to study how the resources are used as well as their impact on instruction, teacher knowledge and student problem-solving.

Control Condition: In Phase 3 of the study, 72 individual teachers will be randomly assigned to the treatment (structured problem-solving program) or waitlist no-treatment control.

Key Measures: Key measures include the use of the SPS resources in Phase 1 and Phase 2. Video and artifacts of resource use will be used for resource revision. Phase 3 will additionally focus on effects of the use of SPS resources on teacher and student outcomes. Teacher portfolios will yield measures of teachers' problem-solving orientation and problem-solving practices during instruction. The general mathematics knowledge of teachers will be measured by the Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) assessment. A student problem-solving assessment will include mathematical problem-solving tasks and survey items on beliefs about mathematics.

Data Analytic Strategy: Hypotheses about the effects of the use of the materials on students will be investigated using hierarchical linear modeling to address the nested data structure of students within classrooms. T-tests and linear regression will be used to study the effects of the use of the materials on teachers.

Related IES Projects: Focused and Coherent Elementary Mathematics: Japanese Curriculum Resources for U.S. Teachers (R305A110500)

Products and Publications

Journal article, monograph, or newsletter

Lewis, C. (2015). What is Improvement Science? Do we Need it in Education?. Educational Researcher, 44(1), 54–61.

Lewis, C., and Takahashi, A. (2013). Facilitating Curriculum Reforms Through Lesson Study. International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, 2(3), 207–217.

Takahashi, A., Lewis, C., and Perry, R. (2013). A US Lesson Study Network to Spread Teaching Through Problem Solving. International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, 2(3): 237–255.

Working paper

Lewis, C.C. (2013). How do Japanese Teachers Improve Their Instruction?: Synergies of Lesson Study at the School, District and National Levels. Washington, DC: National Academy of

** This project was submitted to and funded under Teacher Quality: Mathematics and Science Education in FY 2011.