Expanding Participation in Problem Solving in a Diverse Middle School Mathematics Classroom

In this paper, we discuss our experiences with an after-school program in which we engaged middle-school students with low socioeconomic status from an urban community in mathematical problem solving. We document that these students participated in many aspects of problem solving, including the posing of problems, constructing justifications, developing and implementing problem-solving heuristics and strategies, and understanding and evaluating the solutions of others. We then delineate what aspects of our environment encouraged the students to take part in these activities, particularly emphasising the proactive role of the teacher, the tasks the students completed, and the social norms of our after-school sessions. Finally, we discuss the relationship between our study and the literature on equity research in mathematics education. The United States, like nearly all developed countries in the world, struggles with the issue of how to achieve equity in the mathematics classroom. Numerous studies indicate that students with low socioeconomic status (from hereon, low-SES) perform below the national average on standardised mathematics assessments and are more likely to drop out o