https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1571-8977
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ABSTRACT
Questions regarding the construction of mathematical authority haveimplications for learning, specifically for students’ views of themselves as mathematics learners and doers with valuable contributions. We consider the ideas proposed by eight first-grade students who had the most airtime during 12 lessons of a classroom teaching experiment.We noted when ideas were proposed and how those ideas were responded to. We observed one student, Tia, be positioned and trusted as a source of mathematical authority by their peers and found that Tia had more airtime, made more contributions, and proposed more ideas than their peers. Our theoretical contribution is the link we make between work on mathematical authority and work on epistemic trust by making sense of our findings in terms of research on fact checking and trusting inaccurate informants.
Acknowledgments
The research reported in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation’s DRK-12 Award #1154355. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Here and henceforth, we refer to these students using gender neutral pronouns because gender is not a focus of our study.
2. Recently, the term “Latinx” has come under criticism by many native Spanish speakers as linguistic colonialism/imperialism, given that “x” is not a commonly used letter in the Spanish language. See Del Real’s (Citation2020) article in The Washington Post “‘Latinx hasn’t even caught on among Latinos. It never will..”
3. 20% of 12 Lessons and 20% of recording time amounted to 2.4 lessons and 111:52:36 minutes of transcribed video.
4. Associating a value for a variable (letter) with its ordinal position in the alphabet is a frequently documented strategy to represent relationships between variable quantities, even among adolescents (e.g., MacGregor & Stacey, Citation1997).
Additional information
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Notes on contributors
Bárbara Brizuela
Bárbara M. Brizuela is a Professor of Education at Tufts University’s Department of Education. Her research focuses on children’s early algebraic thinking and practices, focused specifically on early elementary students’ algebraic representations. Her research in general is focused in the context of classroom teaching experiments in local schools.
Susanne Strachota
Susanne Strachota is a research associate and studies how students develop mathematical reasoning, specifically algebraic reasoning. She is interested in understanding the kinds of interactions, mental activity, instruction, and concrete tools that support students in making, refining, and justifying mathematical generalizations. Her work spans K-12 but has primarily taken place with elementary school-aged children.
Sophia Raymond
Sophia Raymond is a PhD student in Mathematics Education in the Department of Education at Tufts University. Her research interests are broadly focused on factors which influence the construction of mathematical identity for students, teachers, and Black girls and women. As a doctoral student, she has worked as a research assistant on several studies exploring different dimensions such as mathematical mindset, mathematical identity and early elementary mathematics students’ understanding of algebraic concepts.
Sofía Savid
Sofía Savid is currently a Philosophy major at Mount Holyoke College. They are particularly interested in ethics and epistemology.
Maria Blanton
Maria Blanton is a Senior Scientist at TERC, Inc., in Cambridge, MA. Her research focuses on learning progressions in children’s algebraic thinking and the impacts of early algebra education on children’s algebra-readiness for middle grades.