Enhancing the Teacher-Curriculum Relationship in Problem-Based Mathematics Classrooms by Connecting Teacher and Student Digital Collaborative Environments

From left to right

Top row: Betty Phillips, AJ Edson, Yvonne Slanger-Grant, Merve Nur Kursav, Chuck Fessler.

Second row: Taren Going, Eli Claffey, Amie Lucas, Brady Tyburski, David Bowers.

Third row: Sunyoung Park, Amit Sharma, Billie Lozen.

Principal Investigators: Elizabeth Phillips, AJ Edson, Kristen Bieda, Joseph Krajcik, Chad Dorsey (Concord Consortium), Nathan Kimball (Concord Consortium)

Project Partners: Concord Consortium

Postdoctoral Research Associates: Taren Going, Sunyoung Park

Graduate Students: Ashley Fabry, Michael Quail, Ahmad Wachidul Kohar, Sasha Rudow, Samantha Wald

Funding: National Science Foundation

Dates: 08/01/2020 - 07/31/2024 (estimated)

Amount: Approximately $2 million

The project will create a digital environment for middle school mathematics teachers to promote collaboration. The digital environment for the teachers links to a student collaborative environment and contains the same problem-based curriculum materials. The environment helps teachers to collaborate and learn from one another. This occurs when teachers plan, teach, and reflect on student learning. The online, digital platform will help teachers work together more easily in networks that might be at different schools. The resources online will include problem-based curriculum materials, classroom artifacts from students, and resources created by teachers. The project will learn about how teachers use resources, collaborate in the digital environment, and support each other through the network. With more curriculum resources being created for online teaching and learning, the project will help understand how mathematics teaching and learning can be best supported.

The design-based research project in mathematics studies a digital, collaborative environment for teachers that is combined with a student collaborative platform for a middle school problem-solving curriculum. The goal is to design and develop the digital collaborative platform so networks of teachers can create, use, and share teaching resources for planning, enactment, and reflection on student thinking. The project will include middle school teachers in the design process. The environment for students enables student thinking to be visible to other students and the teacher. This allows the teacher to archive and then examine student reasoning and thinking. The new environment will allow that work to be shared with other teachers in a professional learning community. The research question is: how do teachers in networks access, generate, use, and share teaching resources (including classroom artifacts) as needed to support mathematics teaching (planning, enactment, and reflection of student thinking)? The project will use teacher interviews and artifacts from the collaborative environment for mixed methods data collection and analysis. Teacher reflection resources will be used to understand how they are thinking about students’ mathematical work and how they are using the platform resources.