New center to address diversity in math education

By Paul Baker

A new five-year, $11.5 million consortium based at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is beginning work on rebuilding the nation’s mathematics education infrastructure.

The United States must rebuild infrastructure for providing mathematics instruction to the nation’s K-12 student population for several reasons:

• Over the next decade, the nation’s schools will have to replace more than two-thirds of current teachers.
• More than half of university faculty in mathematics education will be eligible for retirement in the next two years and almost 80 percent will be eligible for retirement within the next 10 years.
• Over the same period, America’s K-12 student population and the next generation of leaders and teachers in mathematics education will become more ethnically and linguistically diverse.

Determining the best way to accomplish these things and preparing a new cohort of leaders prepared to squarely address America’s student diversity are the goals of the new project, known as “Diversity in Mathematics Education: Building Infrastructure for Learning and Teaching Mathematics with Understanding.”

Funded through the National Science Foundation’s Centers on Learning and Teaching program, the Diversity in Mathematics Education center is one of a network of centers intended to meet the pressing national need for human development, knowledge creation, and resource development in math and science

Principal investigators include two UW–Madison education professors: Walter Secada, who directs the DiME center, and Thomas Carpenter, associate director.

In the area of human development, the DiME center will prepare a new generation of education researchers, instructional leaders, and teachers who will address the mathematics education of diverse student populations in their professional work lives.

In the area of knowledge creation, the DiME center will create integrated, cross-disciplinary analyses of research and theory. These analyses will serve as a model for the field to pursue these issues in a new and integrated manner.

In the area of resource development, DiME researchers will create a database of annotated case studies on the learning and teaching of mathematics among diverse student populations, and software tools for engaging in cross-disciplinary, cross institutional analyses of these and other cases.

The Diversity in Mathematics Education center consists of three interrelated components: a doctoral/postdoctoral component, a professional development component for teachers and instructional leaders, and a teacher education component for preservice teachers.

The Wisconsin Center for Education Research, a department of the UW–Madison School of Education, is the lead institution for this consortium that includes the Madison Metropolitan School District, the University of California at Berkeley, the Berkeley Unified School District, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the California Subject Matter Project.

The work of the project “has already added enormous value to the work of the Madison Metropolitan School District mathematics leaders and teachers,” says Mary Ramberg, teaching and learning director for the district. “We believe the project will enhance our capacity to provide all K-12 students, without regard to demographic characteristics, mathematics instruction that leads to understanding.”