Reading Mathematics—Eleven English Teachers Plus One Mathematics Teacher, the Scoping Review, and a New Survey: A Sequential Mixed Method, Three-Article Dissertation

Abstract

This journey began with the question, how someone learns to read mathematics? This question led to a sequential mixed method, three-article dissertation consisting of a narrative inquiry, a scoping review, and an exploratory factor analysis. The research revolves around how teachers use the written word as a learning resource in high school mathematics courses. The narrative inquiry (Chapter 2) describes what I learned from English teachers and how they taught high school students to read literature. This autobiographical narrative inquiry uses an ascribed and novel mathematical metaphor to make sense of my journey to understand how high school English teachers guide their students to analyze literature. At the end of this journey, I realized literature teachers use a direct, explicit, and systematic approach—similar to how elementary educators teach early reading skills—when teaching high school students about the various literature types. The scoping review (Chapter 3) informed me of 20th-century research through early 2021—identifying 861 potential published works. Eleven ad hoc categories based on title and abstract were identified for elimination purposes. For the selection and characterization, I read and reread 83 eligible records. The remaining 11 records varied in terms of purpose (research journal versus practitioner periodical), methodology (qualitative versus quantitative), and detail of reporting (length of the study). This scoping will help researchers and practitioners find the most relevant or recent studies about using the written word as a learning resource in mathematics. The final article (Chapter 3) describes the survey development exploring how teachers use reading mathematics in high school mathematics courses. Following a two-phase development process, the first phase focused on impaneling experts to determine the survey items’ clarity, conciseness, and relevance. Using Cronbach's alpha, I found good or better inter-rater reliability of clarity, conciseness, and relevance (α = 0.760) for the five possible factors. The pilot study participants were a stratified, random sample of current high school mathematics teachers. The exploratory factor analysis resulted in the identification of ten components. The ten-component solution explained 51.18% of the total variance. The rotated solution exhibited a simple structure.