Abstract

For decades curriculum materials have been used as a means to reform the manner in which mathematics is taught. In an attempt to better understand what impact curriculum materials have on the teaching and learning of mathematics, researchers have begun to analyze the process in which teachers transform curriculum materials into instruction. Given that many of these studies have been broad in nature, I sought to study the specific decisions that three teachers made when planning lesson on geometric transformation and their reasoning for those decisions. In this study I found that while the participants in this study ignored the curriculum material I gave them as well as their district adopted materials in planning instruction, they made a wide variety of decisions with regards to other curriculum. In an attempt to describe this variety of decisions I expanded the previous methods of describing curriculum use decisions adding a self-create category as well as differentiating between the different types of adaptations teachers make. I also found that although teachers used different curriculum materials, they made similar decisions in how they planned the mathematics content of geometric transformations that seem problematic.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Mathematics Education

Rights

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