This page contains the meeting materials for the implement stage of the AM-ME (Adapted Measure of Math Engagement) project. The implement stage is focused on conducting research. In meetings related to the implement stage, some Research Group members supported feedback sessions (cognitive interviews), and students from the Research Group helped us test a focus group activity related to math identity. In order to lead feedback sessions, the Child Trends IRB required that Research Group members receive a research ethics training that they approved. We ended up making sure everyone in the Research Group received this training because it was important for them all to understand the ethics guiding our work. Outside of meetings, Research Group members also supported the implement stage by recruiting students to take our survey. Due to their hard work, we saw an increase in the survey response rate over the three years of this project.
Helpful Tips
- Connect with your IRB, or other oversight committee, early on so that you know what might be required of you to be able to have community members involved in the implement stage. We went back and forth with our IRB quite a bit to land on a solution and a training that worked for everyone.
- For trainings that are required and might contain dry, technical content, we recommend keeping them short and/or trying to incorporate other activities into the meeting to keep community members engaged.
- Involve community members in the implement stage as best you can because they will learn a lot and gain a greater understanding and appreciation for research by getting to be a part of data collection activities. Not everyone will be interested in leading a data collection event, so finding other ways for them to be involved can be helpful.
Math identity student small group meeting (August 2024)
As we continued to refine the AM-ME with the Research Group, we knew that we still needed to come up with stronger questions related to math identity. With some limitations as to the language we could use (part of our partnership agreement with the school district included an agreement that we would not explicitly ask about race or gender on this survey), we needed to be creative. And we decided to engage with only the student members of our Research Group, if they were interested and able, to dig into their math identity. This ended up helping us not only create new survey items, but also to plan for our Fall 2024 data collection.
Meeting length: 1 hour
- Facilitation Guide: Implement - Math identity student small group (August 2024)
- Slides: Implement - Math Identity Student Small Group Meeting (August 2024)
- Identity Flower Activity: Implement - Math Identity Student Meeting - Identity Flower Activity (August 2024)
Ethics training (September and October 2024)
In 2023, when we had students and teachers interested in leading our feedback sessions (cognitive interviews), we worked with the IRB at Child Trends to create an approved research ethics training that could take the place of a longer training like CITI Program’s Human Subjects Research training. As we began to plan for our last round of qualitative data collection in fall 2024, Research Group members requested seeing qualitative results from previous years. So we decided to have everyone go through the Research Ethics training in order to share raw (but still de-identified) qualitative data with them. We conducted this training drop-in style, meaning we provided two day and time options and asked Research Group members to choose one to attend.
Meeting length: 30 minutes
The Adapted Measure of Math Engagement Research Group includes six students (Antonio Chavira, Brianna Espy, Ryan Ombongi, Serrah Ssemukutu, Salma Ahmed, and Diamond Tony-Uduhirinwa), five teachers (Nathan W. Earley, Karina Mazurek, Kathleen Morgan, Karla Rokke, and Ashly Tritch), and five researchers (Marisa Crowder, Samantha E. Holquist, Diane (Ta-Yang) Hsieh, Claire Kelley, and Mark Vincent B. Yu). Researchers Alyssa Scott, Olivia Reyes, and Avalloy McCarthy also extensively contributed to this work. Bloomington Public School District leaders Betsy Hawes, Marcie Coval, Julio Caesar, and Rik Lamm provided support to this work. Jennifer Widstrand served as the project manager.
If you have questions about the Adapted Measures of Math Engagement project, please contact Principal Investigator Samatha E. Holquist at sholquist@childtrends.org.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant #2200437. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.