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Creating Effective Teacher Partnerships: Characteristics of Teachers who Choose to Participate in a K-16 Partnership Laura Bottomley, Karen Hollebrands, and Elizabeth Parry North Carolina State University

Do teachers who apply to participate in a K-16 partnership, like an NSF GK-12, display any common characteristics? The RAMP-UP (Recognizing Accelerated Math Potential in Underrepresented People) program is a mathematically focused K-16 partnership program, funded by the NSF GK-12 program and the GE Foundation. Teachers at nine schools in Wake County, North Carolina applied to work with NC State Colleges of Engineering and Education and Shaw University to enhance the teaching of mathematics in their school through inquiry, with an ultimate goal of increasing the numbers and diversity of students taking algebra by eighth grade and calculus by twelfth.

In this paper we analyze self-reported mathematical teaching practices, mathematics preparation, learning styles, and teacher attitudes towards math. We are interested in discovering whether teachers who apply to participate display any commonalities in these areas and, ultimately whether these characteristics could be used as a predictor of successful implementation of such partnership programs elsewhere. This paper will include a discussion of variables to be used to determine successful implementation.

Mathematics Teacher Questionnaire

Prior to the beginning of the 2004 Fall semester, teachers, university fellows, administrators, and project staff met for a project meeting during which the goals of the project were described, surveys were administered, and inquiry-based mathematics lessons were presented and discussed. One of the surveys that was administered was a mathematics teacher questionnaire that was modified from the 2000 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education mathematics teacher instrument1 developed and administered by Horizons Research, Incorporated (http://2000survey.horizon-research.com/). The survey focused on teachers’ preparation in mathematics content and pedagogy, their goals for mathematics instruction and the activities they currently use to achieve those goals, and the extent to which teachers’ practices reflected the recommendations of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Principles and Standards for School Mathematics . Our results focus on specific questions included in the questionnaire that are directly related to the goals of the RAMP-UP project. A total of 33 elementary teachers teaching grades 3-5, and 4 middle school teachers teaching grades 6-8 provided responses to this survey. A second survey that was administered was the Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles assessment2, used in a variety of applications to identify learning styles of individuals as active versus reflective, sensing versus intuitive, visual versus verbal and sequential versus global. Finally, a third survey, the Modified Fennema- Sherman Attitude Scale3 was administered to partner teachers to measure, among other things,

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Bottomley, L. (2005, June), Creating Effective Teacher Partnerships: Characteristics Of Teachers Who Choose To Participate In A K 16 Partnership Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14510