Project Activities
This project had two strands of research. Strand 1 expanded a longitudinal study already in progress to examine (a) variations in students' exposure to HOTT in the home during early childhood and while problem solving in middle school and (b) the implications of the frequency of HOTT for STEM engagement in later schooling. For strand 2, the research team conducted three experiments in middle school classrooms in which the research team experimentally manipulated use of HOTT during instruction to look at its effects on mathematics performance and engagement.
Structured Abstract
Setting
Participating schools were in diverse urban and suburban districts in Illinois and California with high levels of free and reduced lunch eligible students. These schools had high proportions of minority students, ranging from 69 to 85 percent low-income students, from 0.5 percent to 97 percent African American, and 1 to 42 percent White, and 0.5 to 90 percent Latino (any race) students.
Sample
For the strand 1 longitudinal study, 50 students entered 11th grade during year1 of this project and were followed for 3 years. For strand 2, the 3 experiments involved approximately 80 grade 5 students.
The malleable factor of interest in this project was HOT Talk by teachers and students in the context of mathematics instruction.
Research design and methods
This project had two strands of research. Strand 1 extended an existing study to determine whether variations in children's HOTT while problem solving in middle school relates to their later STEM achievement, engagement, and college enrollment. The children in the study had been a part of the study since they were 14-months old. They entered 11th grade during year 1 of this project, and the research team followed them for another 3 years. The team collected data from students and parents once a year through standardized online surveys. For strand 2, the research team conducted one experiment during each year of the grant. In experiments 1 and 2, the researchers manipulated the presence or absence of HOTT generated by both a teacher and students in a videotaped mathematics lesson on proportional reasoning, holding the visual stream and mathematical content of the lesson constant. In experiment 3, the researchers tested whether students themselves must generate HOTT during learning to lead to broader gains. For all experiments, the researchers randomly assigned students to condition, and the students completed pre-tests, viewed a video lesson, and completed immediate posttests as well as posttests a week after viewing the video lesson.
Control condition
In strand 1, there was no control condition. In strand 2, the control condition for experiments 1 and 2 was the videotaped mathematics lesson without any HOTT generated by the teacher. In experiment 3, the control condition was the videotaped mathematics lesson with HOTT by the teacher but without teacher-student interactions designed to generate HOTT.
Key measures
Key measures included students' HOTT patterns at home and during problem solving with parents, their mathematics grades and courses taken in 11th and 12th grades, and their STEM engagement if they attended college. For strand 2, key measures include researcher-developed tests of conceptual and procedural knowledge of proportional reasoning, a researcher-developed test of students' spontaneous use of HOTT on an unrelated set of scene analogy problems, executive function tasks, and a survey that captures situational interest, self-efficacy, and desire to learn more about STEM topics.
Data analytic strategy
The research team explored the relationships between HOTT, math performance, and engagement using regression models, latent class analysis, and hierarchical linear modeling.
Key outcomes
- Children's home exposure to higher order thinking talk (HOTT) varied systematically by family socio-economic status such that lower income families used less HOTT (Frausel, Freeman, Richland, Levine, Goldin-Meadow, 2020). It also varied by what types of activities families were engaged in (e.g., personal narrative talk led to high HOTT rates (Frausel, Richland, Levine, Goldin-Meadow, 2021), while science and game-related activities led to the most STEM talk (Oswald, Frausel, Levine, & Goldin-Meadow, 2021). HOTT home frequency rates also varied by child brain injury, such that children with early brain injury used less HOTT and were exposed to it more slowly than they acquired other language (Frausel, Vollman, Muzard, Richland, Goldin-Meadow, & Levine, 2021). Also, girls received less spatial language (one form of HOTT) than boys (Oswald, Petersen, & Levin, 2021).
- Experiments in math classrooms showed that students displayed differences in how likely they were to notice opportunities for higher order thinking on a non-math task (Murphy, Zheng, Shivaram, Vollman & Richland, 2021) and that this likelihood predicted how much they learned from a math lesson. This suggests that home experiences may impact how students learn from new instruction. The study also found that if the teacher used high amounts of HOTT during the lesson, all students learned the same amount (Mesghina, Vollman, Trezise, & Richland, 2023). Thus, HOTT may be a no cost mode for increasing equity and high-level mathematical thinking for all students.
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Project contributors
Products and publications
Study registration:
Publications:
Publications Available in ERIC: Find available publications in ERIC for this award here.
Select Publications:
Alhama, Rachel G., Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Ettinger, A., Goldin-Meadow, S., and Alishahi, A. (2023). Linguistic productivity: The case of determiners in English. Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers),(pp. 330-343). Association for Computational Linguistics. (//aclanthology.org/2023.ijcnlp-main.21)
Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Casillas, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2022). Getting to the root of linguistic alignment: Testing the predictions of Interactive Alignment across developmental and biological variation in language skill. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. (escholarship.org/uc/item/5mw1379q).
Frausel, R. R., Richland, L. E., Levine, S. C., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). Personal narrative as a "breeding ground" for higher-order thinking talk in early parent-child interactions. Developmental Psychology, 57(4), 519-534, doi.org/10.1037/dev0001166
Frausel, R. R., Silvey, C., Freeman, C., Dowling, N., Richland, L. E., Levine, S. C., ... & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2020). The origins of higher-order thinking lie in children's spontaneous talk across the pre-school years. Cognition, 200, doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104274
Frausel, R. R., Vollman, E., Muzard, A., Richland, L. E., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2022). Developmental trajectories of early higher-order thinking talk differ for typically developing children and children with unilateral brain injuries. Mind, Brain, and Education, 16(2), 153-166, doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12301
Hansen, J., & Richland, L. E. (2020). Teaching and learning science through multiple representations: Intuitions and executive functions. CBE Life Sciences Education, 19(4), 1-15, doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-11-0253
Lyons, E., Mesghina, A., & Richland, L. E. (2022). Complicated gender gaps in Mmathematics achievement: Elevated stakes during performance as one explanation. Mind, Brain, and Education, doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12312
Mesghina, A., Au Yeung, N., & Richland, L.E. (2022).Performing up to par? Performance pressure increases undergraduates' cognitive performance and effort. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11(4), 554-568, doi.org/10.1037/mac0000023.
Mesghina, A., Vollman, E., Trezise, K., & Richland, L.E. (2023). Worked examples moderate the effect of math learning anxiety on children's math learning and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Educational Psychology, Advance online publication, doi.org/10.1037/edu0000795.
Murphy, A. N., Zheng, Y., Shivaram, A., Vollman, E., & Richland, L. E. (2021). Bias and sensitivity to task constraints in spontaneous relational attention. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 202, doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104981
Richland, L.E., & Zhao, H. (2023). Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning. Frontiers of Psychology, 14:1219414., doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219414
Simms, N. K., & Richland, L. E. (2019). Generating relations elicits a relational mindset in children. Cognitive Science, 43(10), doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12795
Wong, J, Au Yeung, N, Lerner, B, & Richland, L (2021). Instructional design, situational interest, and user experience: a learning experience design approach to promoting children's online engagement, In de Vries, E., Hod, Y., & Ahn, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2021.(pp. 521-524). Bochum, Germany: International Society of the Learning Sciences. (//repository.isls.org//handle/1/7514)
Wong, J. Mesghina, A., Au Yeung, N., & Richland, L.E. (2023).Zooming in or zoning Out: Examining undergraduate learning experiences and why students mind-wander on zoom. Computers in Education, Open.4, 100118
Wong, J., Chen, E., Au-Yeung, N., Lerner, B., & Richland, L. (2022). A learning experience design approach: Investigating the mediating roles of situational interest and mind-wandering in children's online engagement. In Chinn, C., Tan, E., Chan, C., & Kali, Y. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2022(pp. 472-479). International Society of the Learning Sciences. (//2023.isls.org/proceedings) Wong, J., Chen, E., Rose, E., Lerner, B., Richland, L., & Hughes, B. (2023). The cognitive and behavioral learning impacts of embedded video questions: Leveraging learning experience design to support students' knowledge outcomes. In Blikstein, P., Van Aalst, J., Kizito, R., & Brennan, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Learning Sciences - ICLS 2023(pp. 1861-1862). International Society of the Learning Sciences. (repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/10058/1/ICLS2023_1861-1862)
Available data:
Interested individuals can contact the research team for publicly available data at goldinmeadowlab@gmail.com.
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