MOST

Together with the other two research assistants in the MOST research project—Dr. Zeynep Arslan and Jessica Postma—we were eager to learn how teachers from different cultures respond to the teaching practice of building on a MOST. Thus, we asked the PIs of the MOST project to help us refine our research tools to investigate this teaching practice in three cultures: Thailand, Turkey, and the United States.

We started disseminating our findings at the ICME-15 conference. We thank the reviewers for introducing us to the Cultural Transposition Theoretical Framework (Mellone et al., 2019). I look forward to learning more from Dr. Giulia Bini, the panelist I met at the conference, who has implemented this framework in her study.

Zeynep and I will resume our Inter MOST project after my graduation in 2026. Please feel free to email us if you are interested in learning more about our project or exploring opportunities for future collaboration. We are also glad to support our MOST research project team in disseminating their valuable work to your research contexts or classrooms.

MOST Thai
(Summer 2021 – Summer 2022)

I invited Dr. Sakon Tangkawsakul from Kasetsart University and Dr. Thada Panisadee from Chulalongkorn University Demonstration Secondary School to investigate the perspectives of Thai mathematics teachers on classroom norms, to better understand how they value students’ mathematical thinking in Thai educational contexts.

We thank Dr. Laura Van Zoest for joining our team and providing insights into conducting preliminary studies before introducing the MOST and Building on MOSTs works to Thai communities. Additionally, her work with Dr. Shari Stockero on productive sociomathematical norms (Yackel & Cobb, 1996) to support mathematical learning (Van Zoest & Stockero, 2012) was one of our core readings in this project.

I was a mathematics education Ph.D. student at Western Michigan University. I worked on the MOST project—the NSF-funded research project—from May 2020 to May 2023. My contributions to the project include being a part of the coding team and designing diagrams such as aspects of each element of the building practice and public record. Additionally, I informally disseminated the MOST work to Thai teachers and educators. My research interests were productive struggle and investigating how teachers in different cultures implement the building practice.

For more information about Project Activities, please visit: https://buildingonmosts.org/bld-projectactivities.html