Amanda Jansen

• PhD, Educational Psychology
• Professor at University of Delaware

An understanding of partitive division is foundational for numerous other mathematics topics, including unit rate, slope, and probability. However, research has shown that learners tend to have a limited understanding of partitive division when the divisor is a proper fraction. To extend research on conceptions of partitive division in this study,...

In this article, Amanda Jansen, Dawn Berk, and Erin Meikle investigate the impact of mathematics teacher education on teaching practices. In their study they interviewed six first-year teachers who graduated from the same elementary teacher education program and who were oriented toward teaching mathematics conceptually. They observed each teacher...

This article describes a useful approach, called rough-draft talk, to create a classroom culture in which talking is used as a tool in the classroom.

We present a first-hand, longer-term account of one student’s (Christine’s) experiences in and after a mathematics inquiry course. In this course, students actively posed problems, conducted their own mathematical explorations, and wrote journal entries about their experiences. During the course, Christine found that inquiry helped her develop math...

Research on mathematics-related affect is varied in theories and concepts. Here, we record the state-of-art in this research through short sections from leading experts in different areas. We describe the historical development of the concept of attitude and different ways it is defined. Research on students’ self-efficacy beliefs in mathematics is...

Engaging prospective elementary teachers (PTs) in participating productively by making their exploratory (rough draft) thinking public during class discussions remains a constant challenge for instructors of mathematics content courses for teachers, in part because of perspectives incoming PTs may hold about interacting in academic settings. In thi...

This book records the state of the art in research on mathematics-related affect. It discusses the concepts and theories of mathematics-related affect along the lines of three dimensions. The first dimension identifies three broad categories of affect: motivation, emotions, and beliefs. The book contains one chapter on motivation, including discus...

The purpose of this study was to examine and elaborate upon elementary prospective teachers’ (PSTs) conceptions of partitive division with fractions. We examined the degree to which PSTs’ conceptions were connected (i.e., capable of translating between representations correctly; aware that partitive division generates a unit rate for its quotient)...

This edited volume, Vital Directions for Mathematics Education Research , is a significant contribution to our field because each chapter highlights grand problems that researchers must tackle to improve mathematics learning and teaching. The ambitious goals of the chapters could be summarized in a central question: How can research contribute to u...

Transitions from middle school to high school mathematics programs can be problematic for students due to potential differences between instructional approaches and curriculum materials. Given the minimal research on how students experience such differences, we report on the experiences of two students as they moved out of an integrated, problem-ba...

Prospective elementary teachers’ (N = 148) motivation to participate in whole-class discussions during mathematics content courses for teachers, as expressed in their own words on an open-ended questionnaire, were studied. Results indicated that prospective teachers were motivated by positive utility values for participating (to achieve a short-ter...

In this article, we describe features of learning goals that enable indexing knowledge for teacher education. Learning goals are the key enabler for building a knowledge base for teacher education; they define what counts as essential knowledge for prospective teachers. We argue that 2 characteristics of learning goals support knowledge-building ef...

In this study, we examined prospective middle school mathematics teachers’ reflective thinking skills to understand how they learned from their own teaching practice when engaging in a modified lesson study experience. Our goal was to identify variations among prospective teachers’ descriptions of students’ thinking and frequency of their interpret...

Research on the impact of Standards-based mathematics and reform calculus curricula has largely focused on changes in achievement and attitudes, generally ignoring how students experience these new programs. This study was designed to address that deficit. As part of a larger effort to characterize students' transitions into and out of reform progr...

As mathematics teachers attempt to promote classroom discourse that emphasizes reasoning about mathematical concepts and supports students' development of mathematical autonomy, not all students will participate similarly. For the purposes of this research report, I examined how 15 seventh-grade students participated during whole-class discussions...

The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time. The framework is composed of four ski...

In this study I examined the self-reported motivational beliefs and goals supporting the participation of 15 seventh graders in whole-class discussions in 2 discussion-oriented Connected Mathematics Project classrooms. Through this qualitative investigation using semistructured interviews, I inductively identified and described the students' motiva...

The "Navigating Mathematical Transitions" project is a 3-year study that examines students' experiences as they move between "traditional" mathematics curricula and those inspired by the NCTM standards (1989). In this paper, we focus on our method of analysis, particularly the ways that we have conceptualized "mathematical transitions". We describe...

Since the advent of the NCTM Standards (1989), mathematics educators have been faced with the challenge of assessing the impact of Standards-based (or "reform") curricula. Research on the impact of Standards-based curricula has predominantly focused on student achievement; here we consider an alternative: Students' epistemological conceptions of ma...

At Michigan State University, we are offering an online Masters degree to practicing teachers, giving them the convenience of anytime, anywhere virtual courses combined with the rigor for which our programs are known. In the first year of our online program (2000-2001), several faculty members had great success with their online courses. In these c...