Eric.ed.gov – Sustaining the Impact: A Follow-Up of the Teachers Who Participated in the Math-in-CTE Study

During the 2004-05 school year, the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education conducted a study entitled “Building Academic Skills in Context: Testing the Value of Enhanced Math Learning in Career and Technical Education,” commonly referred to as the Math-in-CTE study. This was a random-assignment experiment that tested the effects of enhancing instruction in the mathematics inherent in the curricula for five occupational areas. Post-testing found that students of teachers who had been in the experimental group scored significantly higher than students of teachers who had been in the control group on two standardized tests of mathematics achievement: 9% higher on TerraNova and 8% higher on Accuplacer. These higher scores were the result of professional development that brought career and technical education (CTE) and mathematics teachers together to examine CTE curriculum and develop lessons that delivered explicit instruction in the math concepts inherent in the technical content. The CTE teachers taught these lessons in their regular classes, devoting an average of about 20 hours or 11% of one traditional, 180-hour, full-year class. In this report, the authors present the results of a follow-up study of the teachers who participated in the experiment. They conducted the follow-up in the 2005-06 school year, the year after the experiment ended, to determine the extent to which the teachers in the experimental group had continued to use the instructional method and lessons developed for the experiment and teachers in the control group had adopted any of the lessons. The mail survey found that, in the school year after the experiment ended, almost three-fourths (73%) of the experimental CTE teachers continued to use the method and materials from the study, two-thirds (66%) of the experimental math teachers used examples of applications of math from the lessons, and a little over one-fourth (27%) of the control CTE teachers had taught one or more of the lessons. The personal interviews indicated that for many of the experimental CTE teachers, participation in the study had changed their approach to teaching. They had internalized the seven-element pedagogic model that had been used to develop and deliver the math-enhanced lessons to the extent that they applied it to all their teaching. Other experimental CTE teachers had not been affected to this extent, but continued to use the lessons because their participation in the study caused them to value explicit mathematics instruction that goes beyond occupational applications. Many of the mathematics teachers reported that the study had increased their awareness of the need to include practical applications of the concepts they taught and provided actual examples that they could use. Not enough time and a lack of ft with curriculum were the reasons most often given by the teachers who had not continued using the method and materials. Appendices include: (1) Mail Questionnaire, Mathematics Teachers; (2) Mail Questionnaire, CTE Control Teachers; (3) Mail Questionnaire, CTE Experimental Teachers; (4) Instructions for Randomly Selecting Two Lessons for Personal Interview; (5) CTE Teacher Interview Questions; (6) Mathematics Teacher Interview Questions; (7) Telephone Interview Questions; and (8) “Other” Responses to Question on Reasons for Not Teaching Explicit Mathematics. (Contains 9 tables and 3 footnotes.)