Guidelines for RUME 2 Course Project Report
Your work on a Project Report for RUME 2 will be ongoing through the semester. The final result will be a report of at least one task-based interview you conducted with a student. This is to be an empirical research report—this means your report must showcase and explicitly discuss data you collected in the interview, and that its overarching aim should be to develop and communicate your insights into the student’s thinking and conceptual aspects of the mathematical ideas with which you attempted to engage her or him.
You will develop an interview protocol for your project. Helpful articles about crafting an interview protocol are at Interview Protocols.
Your report will be judged on the basis of the quality of two features: (1) content, and (2) writing and organization.
Content
Your report
- must describe the interviews’ unfolding coherently and must allow readers to construct an image of “what happened”;
- must describe and explain the student’s thinking substantively and insightfully;
- must include warrants (supported by method and argument) for claims and/or explanations, properly documented by accompanying data from the interview(s)
Writing and Organization
The writing should be clear, concise, and to the point. Avoid meandering narratives and excessive use of technical jargon. Write with an explanatory orientation—don’t assume the reader can read your mind or already knows what you mean. Explain what you mean.
Follow APA Guidelines with regard to citations and references, placement of figures, tables, and transcripts within the body of the report. Use section headings (styles of Level 1, Level 2, etc. in MS Word) to organize your prose.
Use the 
RUME 2 Project Template to create your report. This template contains styles and macros that will be useful to you in writing your report.
The body of your report should include the following sections, presented in the given order:
(i) Title page—state the title of your report, your name, and your affiliation.
(ii) Problem Statement (Level 1 heading)—State the motivation and purpose of your investigation and why it is important. Provide an overview of your study, including remarks about perspective(s), frameworks, and/or results from the literature that influenced your study and the analysis of your data. Finally, include the research question your interview(s) are designed to investigate.
(iii) Method (Level 1 heading)—Present the task(s) you employed, providing a rationale for each task individually and for the collection of tasks as a whole. Describe the interview procedure (including ways of putting interviewee at ease), your interactions with the student, and how you captured data (both video and handwritten). In a subsection, provide an overview of how you analyzed the data you collected in the interview—this should describe the processes you enacted, and the lens(es) you employed, to examine the data you collected.
(iv) Analysis and Results (Level 1 heading)—This section can be structured in several ways. One logical way is to organize your narrative as a description of the chronological unfolding of phases of the interview(s), and to embed within each of these your insights about the student’s thinking in the form of descriptions and explanations pertaining to her/his thinking in that phase of the interview.
Use appropriate sections subheadings to thematize the results of your report—this means choosing section heading titles that convey a sense of the main point you wish to make in that section.
Embed relevant transcript excerpts[1][2], and student work or artifacts[3] within your narrative as needed; refer to them using cross references[4] to support and illustrate your claims and conclusions about the student’s thinking. Refer to an excerpt’s line numbers or line number ranges where appropriate (e.g., Excerpt 3, lines 7-12).
(v) Discussion and Conclusion (Level 1 heading)—Provide a wrap up of your study; pull together your insights from the various phases to synthesize what you learned about the student’s thinking and reasoning as they interacted with you around the tasks you set for her/him. Although you may chose to make remarks about implications of what you learned, the crux of your discussion and conclusions should be directly related to what you did and the data you have presented in the body of your report.
(vi) What I Learned About Research (Level 1 heading)—Brief exposition comparing your understanding of researching a student’s understandings prior to beginning your project and your understanding of the same after conducting your project. This is about what you learned about research; address what you learned about your student’s thinking in Discussion and Conclusion.
(vi) Appendix (Level 1 heading)
- the interview protocol that guided your interactions with the student;
- a transcription of your interview (including line numbers and time stamp at regular intervals);
- artifacts generated during the interview(s), such as sketches and relevant pieces of the student’s work.
Timeline
Post each item to your project page using the file name exactly as listed below, where FML stands for your first, middle, and last initials and n stands for a version number of that document. The deadlines listed are latest dates for submitting an item. You can submit an item at any time you are ready for feedback. Update the version number if you submit a second or third draft, but keep the appropriate deadline in the file name.
| Deadline | Item | File Name |
| 0207 | Interview proposal – Draft | 0207.FML.IntProp.Dn.docx |
| 0303 | Interview proposal – Final Draft | 0303.FML.IntProp.Fn.docx |
| 0310 | Interview tasks and protocol – Draft | 0310.FML.IntTasks.Dn.docx |
| 0324 | Interview tasks and protocol – Final Draft | 0317.FML.IntTasks.Fn.docx |
| 0416 | Preliminary report of interview results | 0331.FML.PrelRep.Dn.docx |
| 0502 | Full report | 0423.FML.FullRep.Dn.docx |
Footnotes
- Use Insert/Caption/Excerpt.
- Use Tools/Macro/Macros/Insert Excerpt
- Use Insert/Caption/Figure (or Table)
- Use Insert/Cross Reference to refer to figures, excerpts, tables, etc.
