WKU News

Dr. Hope Marchionda and Dr. Nick Fortune are co-investigators of Teachers of Mathematics as Pedagogical Designers, an interdisciplinary partnership between mathematics education faculty within the WKU Department of Mathematics, Logan County School District K-3 mathematics teachers, and graduate students from the Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology concentration of the Department of Psychological Sciences’ Master of Science program.

Dr. Marchionda, Dr. Fortune and undergraduate research assistant Sarah Hartman, in partnership with Logan County School District, have led several professional development opportunities for K-3 mathematics teachers. The overall goal of the project is to increase teacher’s pedagogical design capacity in an effort to improve mathematics instruction to support student understanding and performance.

This project began in Summer 2022 and will continue through Spring 2023. It involves 18 K-3 mathematics teachers from Logan County from five schools -- Adairville, Auburn, Chandler’s, Lewisburg and Olmstead. During the professional development sessions, teachers engage with curriculum materials that their schools use and modify and adapt tasks to make them high-level and engaging mathematics tasks.

Dr. Marchionda and Dr. Fortune have also partnered with industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology graduate students, supervised by Dr. Katrina Burch, to develop a comprehensive training evaluation plan to complement the professional development workshops. Dr. Burch also coordinates the I-O psychology concentration for the M.S. in Psychology program in the Department of Psychological Sciences. I-O psychology graduate students are providing valuable contributions to the project while simultaneously engaging in applied research. 

The grant is being used as a pilot study for an NSF Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) submission that, if funded, will expand the program to work with 70 K-8 mathematics teachers in Logan County School District over a three-year period.

For more about the project, visit www.wku.edu/pdcmath.  You can also read what the teachers have to say about the project in this WBKO article.