Brown Bag-Drs. Confrey and Maloney
Please join us for our next Brown Bag seminar on Wednesday, April 1, 2009. It will be held at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus in the Collaboratory Commons. Refreshments will be available at 8:30AM and the seminar will begin at 9:00AM. Our presenters will be Dr. Jere Confrey, Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education and Dr. Alan Maloney, Senior Research Fellow at the Friday Institute. Their presentation is entitled New Models for State Mathematics Standards.
The state of North Carolina is now embarked on a rapid and comprehensive revision and alignment of the state standards and assessments for K-12, in response to the recent report of the North Carolina Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accountability. Mathematics is the first disciplinary subject area for which the complete revision of standards and testing is being undertaken. We have proposed a novel means to address state standards through a display that has the articulation of learning trajectories. In addition, by extending the chart to the high school level, we have proposed to the state they enact the following policy at the high school level:
Four years of high school level mathematics are required in North Carolina. For the first three years of that, we are proposing a single comprehensive set of standards that all students must know and be able to do. This single set of standards supports multiple approaches to content sequencing and course packaging. We believe that with a single set of standards, we can support less end-of-course testing. We are proposing that the State test the shared core content after year one, and then the entire set of standards after year three. In addition to developing new aligned EOCs, the NC DPI is developing a system which supports more opportunities for monitoring individual students' progress using benchmarking. We further believe that a single set of standards will also permit us to offer broader professional development opportunities targeted to the needs of all teachers. This single set of standards for the first three years will add to the efficiency and effectiveness of our high school programming. Students would then proceed to select a specialized course of their choice as they move on to fulfill their requirement for a fourth year of mathematics.
All of this work has been done in partnership with the Department of Public Instruction and with writers (teachers and faculty) from across the state. We will recount the process, the current status of the effort, and lessons that can be learned at the interface of educational policy and educational research. By doing so, we hope to encourage our colleagues at the FI and the College of Education to get involved in this important statewide policy initiative.
Dr. Jere Confrey and Dr. Alan Maloney joined NC State in 2007. Dr. Confrey’s research in mathematics education has ranged from student learning of exponential functions at the collegiate level through investigation of early childhood expression and acquisition of multiplicative concepts. Dr. Maloney has co-developed mathematics-educational software with Dr. Confrey, led a small educational software firm, and has been research coordinator for the Confrey research group for the past six years.
Their most recent project has been the synthesis of the research in and development of learning trajectories for rational number reasoning, and the development of diagnostic assessments for those concept areas.