| This dissertation presents findings from a qualitative case study designed to answer the question: How do middle school mathematics teachers' implement journal writing in their classrooms? The study involved three teachers who were already using journal writing in their classrooms, and who agreed to participate in bi-monthly interviews for an entire semester and to make copies of their graded students journals from that semester available for analysis. Three research subquestions focused on categorizing and analyzing the teachers' selection of prompts for student journal writing, the students' responses to the assignments, and the teachers' responses to the students' journal entries. Data analysis revealed that the teachers struggled with all aspects of implementing journal writing in their classrooms. For the most part, their journal prompts did not relate to their classroom lessons. The teachers' judgments about the quality of student responses generally centered on nonmathematical ideas, such as length of the response, rather than on the substance of the responses themselves. The teachers' written responses to students tended to evaluate students' thinking rather than to interpret it. In their efforts to assign journal writing in their mathematics classrooms, these teachers struggled with time constraints, curriculum and assessment constraints, and classroom culture constraints. Further research is needed to determine the extent to which these findings and implications transfer to a range of educational settings. |
