2024 AMTE Dissertation Award Recipients

Siddhi Soni

Impact of ethnomodeling explorations on secondary mathematics pre-service teachers' perceptions of teaching and learning geometry: A multi-case study

Biography

Siddhi Soni is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. As an immigrant Indian American and a multilingual student, she often found that her school experience was disconnected from the mathematics she engaged in outside of the classroom. Outside of school, mathematics often consisted of learning about ingredient ratios to make ethnic Indian foods or learning about the mathematical precision used to build beautiful architecture she visited in India. Her curiosity to learn more about broadening the purpose of learning mathematics drove her to create an environment where every student and teacher’s identity is valued and respected.

Over the past seven years, she has had the opportunity and privilege of working with and learning alongside K-12 students and pre- and in-service teachers. Through synergistically connecting her teaching and research, Siddhi’s current work focuses on ethnomodeling, which is the intersection of mathematical modeling, ethnomathematics and cultural and historical practices to weave together ways to engage and value each and every student’s identity while integrating key aspects of mathematical content in authentic contexts. In the future, Siddhi looks forward to connecting this work with other groups of pre- and in-service teachers as well as K-12 students.

 

Nina Bailey

Describing Critical Statistical Literacy Habits of Mind

Biography

Nina’s passion for critical statistical literacy began in her early teaching career. She often asked students (high school and undergraduate) to make sense of data representations from the real world. She found that many students often considered the statistics superficially by avoiding or not addressing controversial issues in conjunction with statistics and/or not connecting the statistical messages to issues of power. She had very few students who seemed to integrate their critical understanding of the world with their statistical knowledge. She hypothesized this was in part due to the lack of opportunities given to students to consider the non-neutral nature of statistics and mathematics. Such experiences made Nina wonder about how to best support students and teachers in developing these skills, specifically seeing how statistics is inextricably linked to decision making and issues of power. This curiosity sparked Nina’s dissertation research. The literature on statistical literacy focused primarily on the statistical content knowledge needed to make sense of statistical messages. Further, the overwhelming majority of frameworks for statistical literacy did not incorporate a critical* lens. Nina felt it was important to clearly articulate critical statistical literacy habits of mind (CSLHM), develop a usable conceptual framework for classrooms, provide an analytic framework to inform further research, and explore how individuals enact those habits of mind.

In her position as an assistant professor at Montclair State University, Nina continues to explore how best to help future teachers discover the non-neutrality of mathematics and statistics and ponder what that means for their teaching. Moving forward, Nina plans to continue to study how to support students and future teachers develop CSLHM. She will also continue to study teacher noticing of students’ mathematical thinking on technology-enhanced math tasks (work she began as a graduate research assistant). More specifically, she will focus on teacher noticing of students’ statistical thinking on technology-enhanced tasks, how the CSLHM framework can support the development of social justice statistics tasks, and how the CSLHM framework can inform noticing on such tasks.

Nina would like to thank her chair, Dr. Allison McCulloch, her committee, Drs. Luke Reinke, Michelle Stefan, Victor Cifarelli, and Jennifer Lovett, and her new colleagues at Montclair, Drs. Eileen Fernández, Steven Greenstein, Mika Munakata, Nicole Panorkou, and Joseph DiNapoli for their belief and support in her research. She would also like to thank all of the participants that made her research possible.

*Note that Nina is using the word critical to refer to how it is generally used in critical literacies to emphasize the relationship between literacy and power (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993).