PROCEEDINGS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2019
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Examining graduate student instructors’ decision making in coordinated courses
Page: 437
In an effort to improve teaching and learning in undergraduate mathematics courses and help graduate students learn how to teach, many departments across the United States have begun coordinating courses. Although coordination may provide structure and remove some variability in the classroom, there are still many decisions made in the classroom that cannot be coordinated. The purpose of this study was to examine the “uncoordinated” decisions that graduate student instructors made when enacting examples in the classroom. To examine this phenomenon, I studied the cognitive demand of the examples that graduate student instructors chose to enact and the roles that they took on while enacting high cognitive demand examples. As a result, I found that less than 27% of the examples that I observed were enacted at a high level of cognitive demand and that there were three roles (modeling, facilitating, and monitoring) that instructors took on while enacting examples.