Tag: Candace Walkington

Texas Tribune: The Q&A — Candace Walkington

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 20, 2017

In Texas middle schools, only around 70 percent of students actually pass our state standardized tests in math. — Candace Walkington, SMU

Texas Tribune reporter Sanya Monsoor interviewed SMU education expert Candace Walkington, an assistant professor of Teaching and Learning in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, for a Q&A about teaching math to middle school and high school students.

Walkington specializes in mathematics education. She holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from Texas A&M University, and she is a former NSF-GK12 Fellow and college mathematics professor. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from the University of Texas at Austin. She was also an IES Postdoctoral Fellow in Mathematical Thinking, Learning, and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a recipient of the prestigious Spencer Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant.

Walkington’s research examines how abstract mathematical ideas can become connected to students’ concrete, everyday experiences such that they become more understandable. She conducts research on “personalizing” mathematics instruction to students’ out of-school interests in areas like sports, music, shopping, and video games. She also examines ways to connect mathematical practices with physical motions including gestures. Her work draws upon theories of situated and embodied cognition, and she is an active member of the learning sciences community. Her research uses both qualitative methods like discourse and gesture analysis, and quantitative methods like hierarchical linear modeling and educational data mining.

The Texas Tribune article, “The Q&A: Candace Walkington,” published April 12, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Sanya Monsoor
Texas Tribune
With each issue, Trib+Edu brings you an interview with experts on issues related to public education. Here is this week’s subject:

Candace Walkington is an assistant professor in teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University. Her research focuses on innovative ways to teach math to middle school and high school students.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trib+Edu: Tell me about your research as it relates to teaching math differently.

Candace Walkington: My research mainly focuses on ways to make mathematics instruction more engaging for students in grades six through 10. Research suggests that’s a particularly problematic time for students when it comes to motivation and interest in math.

I look at interventions where mathematics is connected to things that students are interested in, like popular culture interests. This could include their experiences playing sports, playing video games, engaging with social media and how they’re using numerical and algebraic reasoning in all of these contexts.

Trib+Edu: Why is mathematics intervention important for this age group?

Walkington: In Texas middle schools, only around 70 percent of students actually pass our state standardized tests in math. If you look at the passing rate for students who are economically disadvantaged, it’s around 60 percent. These numbers have been on a pattern of decline.

According to ACT scores, only 42 percent of test takers in Texas are deemed college ready in mathematics, meaning they have a reasonable chance of being successful in an introductory college algebra course.

So things are happening around this middle school transition and the end of high school transition, which is causing a lot of students to turn away from mathematics, disengage and run into trouble in these classes.

Read the full story.

Tags Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, Candace Walkington

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Mind & Brain Technology

Students grasp abstract math concepts after they demonstrate them with arm motions

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 11, 2016

Video game that directs students to make arm movements fosters understanding for proving complex geometry theorems

Students who make relevant arm movements while learning can improve their knowledge and retention of math, research has shown.

Now researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a model using geometry proofs that shows potential for wide adoption — a video game in which students make movements with their arms to learn abstract math concepts.

The research is the first to use widely available technology combined with relevant body gestures and apply it to the learning of complex reasoning in a highly conceptual, pre-college math domain — geometric proof production.

“When they’re doing geometry, students and teachers gesture all the time to show shapes, lines, and relationships, and the research suggests this is very beneficial,” said teaching expert Candace Walkington, assistant professor of teaching and learning in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

“Our goal is to create an environment that supports students in making motions that help them understand the math better, Walkington said.”

Walkington and educational psychology professors Mitchell Nathan and Peter Steiner, University of Wisconsin-Madison are collaborating on the project with SMU Guildhall, SMU’s graduate-level academic program for digital game-development.

The researchers have been awarded a four-year $1.39 million grant for their work from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences, Educational Research Grants.

“Much of math education is about learning rules and procedures. Geometry proof is different,” said Nathan, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Students have to learn how to think conceptually about why certain statements about shapes are true, how they are always true, for all members of a class of shapes, and how to explain it to others so they are convincing. We think that level of mathematical understanding is embodied.”

Emerging research is investigating the theory that our body actions can actually influence our thoughts, in addition to our thoughts driving our actions. Body movement can induce new activity in our neural systems. This activity can create and influence our learning, thinking and mental organization. This mind-body partnership, dubbed “embodied cognition,” is driving new approaches to learning subjects such as math.

“What is so exciting about this geometry research project is that it shows how theories of embodied cognition are becoming mature enough to start to develop a whole new class of educational technology that we can envision as part of everyday math classrooms in the near term,” Nathan said.

Video game fosters learning by pairing gestures with geometry proofs
At the heart of the new study is the video game “The Hidden Village.” A motion-capture video game, “The Hidden Village” helps foster learning by pairing motions with geometry proofs. Designed for a Windows PC computer with Microsoft’s Kinect 2 motion-capture camera attached, the game’s signature design element is an episodic story paired with directives for arm movements.

Each episode leads a student to perform certain motions with their arms, correlating those with questions and answers related to proofs of geometry theorems.

To begin, a student stands in front of the Kinect camera. The camera detects the student, then calibrates to each student’s body shape, size and movement, familiarizing itself with the student.

When play begins, the camera and software detect movements in real time and provide feedback about whether the students are appropriately matching the motions.

A demo of the latest version of the video game is available on Youtube, with an explanatory video at this link.

Directed body motions can improve proving of theorems
The previous version of the game was tested at a high school in Dallas in February with positive results. The researchers are presenting those results in early November at the Psychology of Mathematics Education conference in Tucson, Arizona.

Preliminary findings showed students liked learning in the video game format, and benefited when they were encouraged to think about how their body motions related to the geometric proofs.

“High school students really struggle to learn proof in geometry, and often their initial performance on these proofs is very low,” said Walkington, who specializes in math education and connecting it to students’ concrete everyday experiences. “However, making and thinking through the motions from the game, they’re given a new resource with which to think about the problems.”

Recent research led by Nathan found that directed body motions can lead to improvements in geometry theorem proving even when students claim no awareness of the relevance of the actions to the mathematical tasks. Research has also found that verbal prompts from a teacher to connect the actions to mathematical ideas further improve student proof practices.

The new grant, “How dynamic gestures and directed actions contribute to mathematical proof practices,” runs from July 2016 through June 2020. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information, www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, Candace Walkington, Featurette

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Researcher news Technology Videos

Mustang Minute! Simmons researcher tests if video game motion capture can teach math

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 21, 2015

Motion capture software, popular in the world of video gaming, is being tested to see if it may be a useful tool in the classroom.

Researchers know that the more engaged students are, the more likely they are to learn.

In her research, SMU teaching expert Candace Walkington, assistant professor of teaching and learning in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, has measured different kinds of engagement and its effectiveness as a teaching tool.

Now Walkington has asked students to test motion capture software as a tool for teaching math. The students are enrolled in summer video game design camps at Guildhall, SMU’s premier graduate video game education program.

Students practiced a motion capture software program that teaches geometry. The program was created by Walkington in partnership with Extreme Reality, an industry leader in motion capture software. Results of the preliminary testing will be included in a grant proposal Walkington is preparing to test the software further.

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For the preliminary test, Walkington asked students to read problems on a computer and then move their arms to either signal their answers or advance the math questions to the next sequence.

The study is one of several for Walkington, whose previous studies have focused on how abstract mathematical concepts can be grounded in students’ out-of-school interests, experiences and everyday reasoning practices.

Another of Walkington’s recent studies, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, draws data from Pennsylvania classrooms using an in-school intelligent tutoring system for Algebra I. The software personalizes instruction to match the pace of each student, detects a student’s current state of knowledge, determines which kinds of problems to present and what feedback and help are needed, and tracks each child’s progress. Walkington has a long-time collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.

She has also been awarded a grant as part of the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the National Academy of Education. The $55,000 grant supports early career scholars working in critical areas of education research.

Walkington earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Texas A&M University, and had planned to have a career as a financial mathematician. She changed her career path after completing a National Science Foundation graduate teaching fellowship at a high-poverty rural school in Iola, Texas.

There Walkington discovered firsthand the satisfaction of designing innovative strategies to help struggling fifth and sixth graders learn math. The experience brought back memories of her own seventh-grade struggle with algebra, which had threatened to derail her interest in math.

Walkington has also participated in the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

While working on her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, Walkington collaborated on research geared toward identifying what teacher behaviors are a strong predictor of student success on standardized math tests. The research was incorporated into the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching Project, one of the largest research efforts in U.S. history to identify and understand effective teaching. The project is shaping educational policy nationally.

Walkington and research colleague Michael P. Marder, executive director of UTeach Science Program, University of Texas at Austin, contributed protocols to the MET Project based on their findings, including one finding that classrooms where the teacher focuses specifically on students deeply understanding math have higher test scores compared to classrooms where teachers focus on drill and standardized test preparation. In addition, they also found that classroom management was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for learning.

Walkington’s research appears in a new groundbreaking book about the MET Project, “Designing Teacher Evaluation Systems: New Guidance from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project,” (Wiley, July 2014). Walkington, who led a team that analyzed 1,000 video math lessons of teachers around the country to code effective teaching, is first author on a chapter. — Margaret Allen

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Tags Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, Candace Walkington

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Researcher news

Study will teach algebra with student-authored stories that draw on their own interests

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 20, 2014

Tapping students’ rich algebraic ways of reasoning during out-of-school activities — such as sports, social networking and video games — generates personalized connections

Can students learn algebra from Instagram and video games?

Teaching researcher Candace Walkington, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, thinks so.

Walkington’s new study, funded by the National Academy of Education, will test that idea.

“In previous work, I found that students draw upon rich algebraic ways of reasoning when pursuing their out-of-school interests in areas like sports, social networking and video games,” said Walkington, whose research focus is evidence-based effective teaching. “Making connections to these topics in algebra class can improve long-term understanding of algebraic ideas.”

The new study asks pre-algebra students to author their own algebra stories based on their personal interests.

Candace Walkington, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching & Learning in the SMU Simmons School, teaches evidence-based teaching strategies to future educators. (Credit: SMU)

Students in middle schools in Dallas Independent School District will describe how linear relationships approximate what they encounter in their everyday lives, such as how they accumulate followers on Instagram or score points in a video game over time, said Walkington, an assistant professor of teaching and learning.

Approximately 200 pre-Algebra students in eight classrooms at schools in the Dallas Independent School District are participating in the study. Based on results from earlier research, Walkington hypothesizes that authoring the stories will elicit students’ interest in the content to be learned by drawing on their knowledge about home and community.

A pilot version of the study begins Spring 2015. The full study starts Fall 2015.

Walkington was awarded the grant as part of the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the National Academy of Education. The $55,000 grant supports early career scholars working in critical areas of education research.

Making math accessible and captivating is critical for encouraging learning
Algebra is a gatekeeper to many careers and to higher-level mathematics, making it critical for students to master, Walkington said, but students struggle to understand the abstract representations.

“Students often can’t see the connection between their world and algebra,” she said. “Exploring ways to connect math to their lives, experiences and knowledge is critical for making it accessible and captivating. That’s especially true when considering students from diverse backgrounds.”

Walkington’s previous studies — including participation in the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and her long-time collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center — have focused on how abstract mathematical concepts can be grounded in students’ out-of-school interests, experiences and everyday reasoning practices.

“These studies combine cognitive theories related to activation of prior knowledge with motivational theories related to the development of interest in order to understand and intervene upon students’ mathematical understanding,” Walkington said.

Search for effective teaching drives quantitative, qualitative methods
Walkington’s study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to compare an experimental group to a control group. She will look at how the intervention elicits students’ interest in learning algebra, and at the impact on students’ classroom discussions, on learning algebra concepts and promoting a positive outlook toward math.

“Personalizing instruction has the potential to improve learning and attitudes in algebra courses that are a key barrier to academic advancement and economic attainment,” said Walkington, a professor in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development.

Walkington’s NAE study at Marsh Middle School in Dallas will provide personalized learning interventions for seventh and eighth grade math students. The study complements a new grant recently awarded to Dallas Independent School District by the Gates Foundation to build personalized learning models in eight DISD schools. Walkington will provide professional development to the eight teams, and is planning a research study that describes the process all eight schools go through as they build personalized learning models on their campuses.

The research is critical for establishing evidence-based criteria for teaching.

“There actually hasn’t been an extensive body of research showing if the customized approach is effective, for whom it’s effective, or what content it’s effective for. So there’s a lack of evidence,” says Walkington. “At the same time, we have this rise of technological systems in the schools with amazing potential to individualize instruction to each student.”

New design studies build and expand on previous findings
One of Walkington’s recent studies, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, draws data from Pennsylvania classrooms using an in-school intelligent tutoring system for Algebra I. The software personalizes instruction to match the pace of each student, detects a student’s current state of knowledge, determines which kinds of problems to present and what feedback and help are needed, and tracks each child’s progress.

Walkington took that a step further by adding student interests and hobbies into the software. After surveying ninth grade students about their interests, Walkington wrote math problems around those interests. The problems were programmed into the software, so problems are presented in the context most appealing to each individual student.

“We found that students receiving personalization performed better on the math lesson than students presented problems that weren’t customized to their interests. We also found that one or two months later – on future lessons that weren’t personalized – those students who had received personalization were still doing better,” Walkington said.

That study has been expanded to another group of high school students. In a recent paper presented at the Educational Data Mining Conference in London, Walkington demonstrated that personalization improved students’ interest in mathematics, which in turn improved achievement for those not interested in math initially. Ongoing studies in Houston and San Antonio schools allow students the choice of personalized context for each problem.

“We think the combination of personalization and choice is going to have even more impact than personalization by itself,” she said. Early results from these studies support this hypothesis.

Innovative strategies help struggling fifth and sixth graders
Walkington earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Texas A&M University, and had planned to have a career as a financial mathematician. She changed her career path after completing a National Science Foundation graduate teaching fellowship at a high-poverty rural school in Iola, Texas.

“We’re focusing on the sixth- to ninth-grade math when students start to lose interest. At the same time they also start to become deeply interested in things outside of school, like music and sports,” Walkington says. “In this next study we’re hoping we see that personalization also gives them a more positive outlook toward mathematics and shows them how much they like math class.”

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SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, Candace Walkington

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

KQED: In Teaching Algebra, the Not-So-Secret Way to Students’ Hearts

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 10, 2013

Journalist Katrina Schwartz with California Public Media station KQED reported on the research of SMU Assistant Professor Candace Walkington, who authored a year-long study of 141 ninth graders at a Pennsylvania high school and found that students whose algebra curriculum was personalized to their interests mastered the concepts faster than those students whose learning wasn’t personalized.

The article, “In Teaching Algebra, the Not-So-Secret Way to Students’ Hearts,” was published Dec. 9.

Walkington teaches in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the SMU Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development. Her research examines how abstract mathematical ideas can become connected to students’ concrete, everyday experiences such that the concepts are better understood. Walkington conducts research on “personalizing” mathematics instruction to students’ out of-school interests in areas like sports, music, shopping and video games. She also examines ways to connect mathematical practices with physical motions including gestures. Her work draws upon theories of situated and embodied cognition, and she is an active member of the learning sciences community. Her research uses both qualitative methods like discourse and gesture analysis, and quantitative methods like hierarchical linear modeling and educational data mining.

Read the article.

EXCERPT:

Katrina Schwartz
KQED
Education researchers are beginning to validate what many teachers have long known — connecting learning to student interests helps the information stick. This seems to work particularly well with math, a subject many students say they dislike because they can’t see its relevance to their lives.

“When I started spending time in classrooms I realized the math wasn’t being applied to the students’ world in a meaningful way,” said Candace Walkington, assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University. She conducted a year-long study on 141 ninth graders at a Pennsylvania high school to see whether tailoring questions to individual student interests could help students learn difficult and often abstract algebra concepts.

Researchers studied a classroom using Carnegie Learning software called Cognitive Tutor, a program that has been studied frequently. In the study, half of the students chose one of several categories that interested them — things like music, movies, sports, social media — and were given an algebra curriculum based on those topics. The other half received no interest-based personalization. All the problems had the same underlying structure and were meant to teach the same concept.

Walkington found that students who had received interest-based personalization mastered concepts faster. What’s more, in order to ensure that learning was robust, retained over time, and would accelerate future learning, she also looked at student performance in a later unit that had no interest-based personalization for any of the students. “Students that had previously received personalization, even though it was gone, were doing better on these more difficult problems as well,” said Walkington.

She also found that struggling students improved the most when their interests were taken into account. “We picked out the students who seemed to be struggling the most in Algebra I and we found that for this sub-group of students that were way behind the personalization was more effective,” Walkington said. Specifically, the study tested students’ ability to turn story problems into algebraic equations — what’s called algebraic expression writing.

“That’s one of the most challenging skills to teach students because it’s a very abstract skill,” Walkington said. She hypothesizes that the abstract nature of the concepts actually allowed students to more easily generalize and apply the same knowledge to a wide variety of situations and to more difficult problems in later units.

Walkington is working to expand her study to all the ninth graders in a school district of 9,000 students. “The bigger, you make it the harder it is to tap into the interests of students,” Walkington said. But she’s confident that there are some general-interest categories that many students share, like sports and movies.

Read the article.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, Candace Walkington

In Texas middle schools, only around 70 percent of students actually pass our state standardized tests in math. — Candace Walkington, SMU

Video game that directs students to make arm movements fosters understanding for proving complex geometry theorems

Motion capture software, popular in the world of video gaming, is being tested to see if it may be a useful tool in the classroom.

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More SMU Research news

Tapping students’ rich algebraic ways of reasoning during out-of-school activities — such as sports, social networking and video games — generates personalized connections

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news