How much impact can dissertation research optimally have? How much difference can research on teachers in another country make to the U.S.? Can an international student produce a book that attracts widespread interest from educators? Students in comparative education may dream of positive answers to these questions but it is rare for such dreams to become reality. The case of Liping Ma and her book is an exception that demonstrates the potential significance of international research in education, even when done by a single researcher. Since this book has created something of a sensation, it deserves to be better known within CIES.

Liping Ma came to the U.S. from China in 1989 to do graduate study, first at Michigan State University and later at Stanford. In China her earlier education had been idiosyncratic. With only eight years of basic education, she was sent to a mountainous region during the Cultural Revolution where she taught for seven years and then served as school principal and county teaching and research coordinator. She educated herself to the point where after the Cultural Revolution, she passed a test for admission to a university master’s program. She immersed herself in world classics of education, including Confucius, Rousseau, Dewey, William James and well-known Russian scholars.

Determined to continue her studies in the U.S., she arrived at MSU with only $30 in her pocket. With help from faculty members Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Lynn Paine, she found an assistantship in MSU’s National Center for Research on Teacher Learning. In coding data for the center, Ma was surprised at the difficulty U.S. elementary school teachers in the sample had in answering questions about how they would teach topics like division with fractions. Thinking that Chinese teachers would have an easier time answering such questions, she got an initial exploratory grant of $1000 from the NCRTL director to help her do some exploratory interviewing in China.

Since Ma’s family was not happy in Michigan, Ma then transferred to Stanford where she became a student of Lee Shulman. He took an interest in her preliminary investigations of teacher knowledge in mathematics. As a result, although she did not consider herself either a comparativist or a mathematics educator, she collected data from a small sample of Chinese teachers. Other than a Spencer grant to support a year of dissertation writing, she had hardly any external funding to support this work. Ma finished her dissertation in 1996. With data on Chinese teachers (and to a lesser extent American teachers), she analyzed what it means for elementary school teachers to have a “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.”

A postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley, with Alan Shoenfeld as her mentor, enabled Ma to turn the dissertation into a book. During this time, Ma also enjoyed a particularly fruitful editorial relationship with a colleague Cathy Kessel, who helped her clarify the ideas and language for an American audience while preserving Ma’s distinctive voice and sense of place. The audience Ma had in mind included U.S. teachers and mathematics educators. Although she had been afraid that U.S. teachers would be offended by her contention that weak knowledge of mathematics was a widespread problem among them, the book in general has been very well received not only by teachers and mathematics educators, but most surprisingly by mathematicians. Even before it was published, the manuscript was being circulated and discussed by influential mathematicians and mathematics educators. Two mathematicians, in particular, played an important role in bringing the book to the attention of colleagues: Richard Askey at the University of Wisconsin and Roger Howe at Yale.[2]

By latest count, Ma’s book has sold more than 46,000 copies. In the Los Angeles school district alone over 6,000 copies have been purchased. In some respects this dissertation research has seemed to have more influence than well funded large-scale comparative studies. The paper on the impact of this book by Yangping Fang and Lynn Paine offers various reasons for its appeal and influence. Though much has been said about the ideas in the book not being entirely new, finding a setting for comparison where teachers actually put these challenging ideas into practice has led to the ideas being taken more seriously. Fang and Paine also point out that the book has influenced some groups more than others. For example, while attracting much notice and discussion from the mathematics and mathematics education community, it has been little used in mathematics methods courses in schools of education. Astonishingly, both sides in the “math wars” have used it to argue their case. Scholars in comparative education, however, have paid little attention to this extraordinary example of comparative research. This is unfortunate. As Fang and Paine conclude in summarizing what can be learned from this experience: “The story of this work speaks to the power of international and comparative work, particularly its ability to make the familiar strange. In Ma’s case, this allowed people to recognize important issues in new ways, to be willing to consider issues in ways they had not, and even simply to pay attention to them.” (p. 22)

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[1] This newsletter article is based on a longer paper by Yangping Fang and Lynn Paine titled “Impact of the Book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma on the U.S. Mathematics and Mathematics Education Community”. That paper was commissioned by the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education’s Committee on a Framework and Long-term Research Agenda for International Comparative Education Studies of The National Academies/National Research Council. Persons interested in understanding the phenomenal success of this research and book should read not only the book itself but also this fascinating paper. It contains many lessons of importance not only to the dissemination and influence of comparative education research, but to education research more generally.

[2] Howe’s review of the book in Notices of the American Mathematical Society and Askey’s in the American Educator were particularly influential. See How review in AMS Notices, September 1999 (also reprinted in Journal of Research in Mathematics Education) and Askey review in http://www.aft.org/publications/american_educator/fall99/amed1.pdf