| The instructional practices used to teach mathematics in U.S. classrooms have undergone few changes during the past century. Decades of poor performances in international tests of mathematics achievement, however, have caused a substantial portion of the mathematics education community to begin advocating for the reform of mathematics education. Changes to the traditional instructional practices---largely reliant on passive learning processes such as memorization---constitute the heart of the reform agenda. Specifically, the reformers advocate for teaching mathematics as a discussion rather than a drill, emphasizing the process of arriving at a solution over the actual solution. In reform-based classrooms, students are expected to invent their own problem-solving processes to defend or modify their proposals in response to peer-inquiry. The teacher's role in the classroom is to facilitate such discussion rather than supplying algorithms and evaluating answers. In summary, the aim of the reform movement is the establishment of classroom environments in which mathematics is actively rather than passively learned.;Research supporting the reform movement has used predominantly qualitative research methods and thus has been criticized for its inability to draw causal conclusions regarding the effectiveness of reform approaches to mathematics education. The reform community has rebutted such criticisms, claiming that the rigorous procedural standardization required by the randomized control trials commonly used to establish efficacy would violate the free-flowing, conversational nature of reform instruction.;The purpose of the present study is to investigate the efficacy of reform-based instructional practices by applying a quasi-experimental methodology to a large-scale, longitudinal research database. This approach examines the influence of natural variations in teacher application of reform-based teaching techniques on student achievement using quantitative methods, thereby avoiding the problem of procedural standardization plaguing empirical studies. Results of the study revealed weak relationships between achievement at the elementary school level and all of the instructional practices examined. However, only items assessing teacher encouragement of process-focused mathematical discourse among students demonstrated positive associations with student achievement. Thus, the present study offers support for the teaching practices of the reform movement. |
