Collaborative Research: R&D: Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers' Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection on Children's Mathematical Reasoning

This project uses cyber-enabled technology to support the practice and development of teachers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). We are leveraging the Video Mosaic Collaboratory (VMC), an interactive digital environment supporting video-based teacher professional development and related research.

The VMC contains indexed video cases and accompanying data on students’ mathematical reasoning, an important and extensive collection based on NSF-supported research spanning two decades.

The first phase of this project will use the VMC to support a distributed, interdisciplinary team of mathematics teacher educators and learning scientists in designing and sharing adaptable teacher professional development interventions. This research is expected to produce successful interventions and to generate knowledge and strong testable hypotheses about factors influencing intervention success.

The second phase of research will test the hypothesis that well-designed interventions based on studying videos of children’s thinking can increase teachers’ performance on measures of expertise that involve discussing and analyzing children’s thinking, math content knowledge, and beliefs about mathematics and children’s thinking.

The study will determine whether VMC interventions are more powerful than interventions based solely on mathematics problem solving experiences.