New Jersey

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

Principal Investigator:

Carolyn Maher

Co-Investigator:

Cindy Hmelo-Silver

Grace Agnew

Marjory Palius

Project Overview

Background & Purpose:

Researchers in the Video Mosaic Collaborative led by Rutgers University (RU) and The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) will use design research to develop adaptable teacher professional development interventions utilizing the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning video collection on children’s mathematical thinking, to be housed in Video Mosaic (VM), an interactive digital environment developed by the RU Libraries. Workflow expressions will be used to compare and improve interventions across sites in design-research cycles, and to preserve successful interventions for future users, through incorporation and indexing into the VM. A summative study will test the hypothesis that well-designed TPD interventions that make extensive use of the collection and VM are more powerful than comparably designed interventions that do not incorporate the collection and VM.

Setting:

The settings will include a range of institutional settings from K-12 school districts to university settings in the Northeast and one Midwestern site.

Research Design:

The research design for this project is longitudinal, cross-sectional, and comparative, and is designed to generate evidence which is descriptive (case study, design research, observational) and causal (quasi-experimental). This project collects original data using diaries/journals/records kept by subjects; assessments of learning/achievement tests; personal, videography, and web log observation; online and paper and pencil self-completion questionnaires; face-to-face and telephone structured interview-administered questionnaires; face-to-face and telephone informal interviews; and focus groups. Instruments under development include a pre-post assessment instrument to measure participants’ content knowledge and ability to identify student reasoning from sample cases, a survey about course factors based on Bielaczyc's Social Infrastructure Framework, and a survey on teacher beliefs. The project will employ mixed qualitative (e.g., field observations, videography, interviews, case studies) and quantitative methods using ANCOVA and regression approaches to analyze data from quasi-experimental studies based on within-class comparisons of treatment and experimental groups randomly assigned.

Other Products:

TPD interventions and assessments made available through Video Mosaic.

On the Web:

Video Mosaic Collaborative

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