Getting Started: Assess student work to identify the problem and develop a hypothesis. Overview: We invited prealgebra instructors to a pre-semester staff development ("flex") activity. The goal was to identify a focus for the Teaching Community's research. We assessed student work on the previous semester's final exam: to define "the problem"; to articulate our assumptions about learning (or the lack of it!) What concerned us most: Roughly 80 percent of the randomly sampled students missed word problems involving percents and proportional reasoning. Why aren't students learning?: We were surprised by common themes that arose when we conjectured about why previous learning was not retained. We agreed that students' difficulties arose from a lack of conceptual understanding; compartmentalized and disjointed presentation of concepts in the course; a curriculum that encourages mimicry and memorization instead of knowledge building; material that does not seem relevant to students. We hypothesized that if students developed a conceptual understanding of ideas linked to proportional reasoning, their ability to use these ideas to solve problems would be improved and retained. Prealgebra Student Learning Outcomes (SLO's), sample problem, rubric

Click to play. (0:54) Facilitator's Perspective Getting started: Myra Snell comments on the introductory flex activity for prealgebra instructors.

Click image to play. (1:54) Instructor's Perspective Finding a research focus: Erich Holtmann and Pat Wagener discuss their hypothesis. Sample classroom-based research project