Gender-Specific Differentiation of Teachers' Perspectives of and Interactions with Students

Open Access
- Author:
- Timlin, Samantha Elizabeth
- Area of Honors:
- Secondary Education
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Dr. Rose Mary Zbiek, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Rose Mary Zbiek, Thesis Honors Advisor
Dr. Edith Frances Arbaugh, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- mathematics education
gender differences
teacher-student interactions - Abstract:
- As an essential part of the classroom environment, teacher–student interactions influence students' experience with mathematics. Thus, it is important to discover factors that affect interactions between teachers and students. The purpose of this study was to provide more developed insight into teacher–student interactions than that found in existing research, such as (Hart, 1989; Becker, 1981; Duffy, Warren, & Walsh, 2001; Jungwirth, 1991). In particular, this study aims to discover if and, if so, how the gender of the student influences the teacher's interaction with the student by using a novel application of Jaworski's (2002) teaching triad. While some research has been conducted on gender differences in teacher–student interactions, none has looked at the three dimensions that this research considers: affective sensitivity, cognitive sensitivity, and mathematical challenge. To investigate whether teachers' perceptions of and interactions with students differed based on gender, teachers were interviewed and asked to characterize high- and low-performing female and male students. The teachers’ classes were observed, and teacher–student interactions with female and male students were categorized as positive or negative instances of each of the three dimensions. These instances were analyzed for both qualitative and quantitative differences between the genders. The results of this study suggest that teachers more frequently interact with female students than with male students both in total number of interactions and in number of instances of cognitive sensitivity. The research also suggests that teachers more frequently interact with students they perceive to be high and low performers than with other students in the class. More thorough research is needed to confirm these results but these findings have implications for how secondary mathematics teachers communicate with students