| The practice of blending children's literature into elementary mathematics lessons has received significant attention in the literature. Over the last thirty years, numerous authors have written about this approach promoting it from a conceptual and experiential perspective. Additionally, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics supports this practice in its current Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000) document with several references and suggestions for implementation. However, there are very few in-depth studies of teachers' practices associated with this instructional approach. This dissertation study addresses this gap.;More specifically, this dissertation was motivated by a hypothesis---generated on the basis of informal observations of elementary school teachers---that mathematics lessons involving children's literature may promote the use of several instructional practices promoted by the NCTM Standards. My informal observations further suggested that these practices are ones that elementary school teachers tend to use in language arts instruction rather than in their other mathematics lessons.;To research this hypothesis, I studied the instructional practices of three elementary school teachers in three different instructional contexts: (1) mathematics lessons that incorporate children's literature, (2) mathematics lessons that do not incorporate literature, and (3) language arts lessons that focus on literature. Data was collected during the 2001--2002 school year through classroom observations and individual teacher interviews.;Significant changes were noted between the practices that each teacher used in the three instructional contexts with respect to the design of tasks, the quality of classroom discourse, and the nature of learning environment. Several trends were identified, the most relevant of these was the increase of constructivist-based practices in all three areas during mathematics instruction that incorporated children's literature, especially when compared to regular mathematics instruction. Even though the extent of this increase varied for each teacher, the overall trend in the data reflected a remarkably more interactive and student-centered approach in the mathematics-with-literature lessons. |
