Using Participant Involvement to Grow Library Content, Community, Education Impact, and Sustainability (NSDL – Usage Development Workshops services track)
Statement of Need
Thoughtful use of educational technologies can transform education and improve student learning in powerful ways (Coley, R. J., Cradler, J. & Engle, P. K., 1999). Standards for mathematics education and for technology are being set by local and national educational policy makers and by professional organizations that focus on the use of tools as a support for students learning complex skills that are increasingly in high demand such as collaboration, problem-solving, information analysis, and effective communication. Educational technology supports new curricula based on real-world problems and explorations, featuring scaffolded and experiential learning with reflection built in for both teachers and students, and offering tools to build extended learning communities of students, teachers, parents, and subject practitioners. New software in mathematics such as Geometer’s Sketchpad is enabling dynamic explorations changing the learning of mathematics. These opportunities and changes require corresponding evolution of teacher education and professional development along with new forms of assessment that are able to reflect these new understandings in students and not merely their abilities to manipulate the technologies (Quellmalz, 2004).
It is the experience of the Math Forum
The demands for effective professional development are high, as one can see in the report from the RAND Mathematics Study Panel, 2003: "The most fundamental effort in [professional development] is identifying and shaping professional learning opportunities for teachers (or prospective teachers) to enable them to develop the requisite mathematical knowledge, skills, and dispositions to teach each of their students effectively. However, the challenge is not just to learn what is needed but to create arrangements for professional work that supports continued improvement of teachers’ knowledge and their pedagogical skills. Meeting this challenge will involve experimenting with ways of organizing schools and school days to support these professional learning opportunities (e.g., scheduling of the week’s classes, scheduling for collaborative planning and critiquing, freeing up time for mentoring, or providing on demand professional development). "
Thus, in this proposal we are responding to this need for new models of professional development. We propose a model that integrates face-to-face and virtual components and addresses multiple objectives: • outreach to a broad spectrum of teachers of mathematics who are unfamiliar with use of the Internet for mathematics education and with NSDL resources in particular • the development of new forms of continuous professional development that provide easy to access, just-in-time support and membership in a sustaining, readily available professional network • a deepening of mathematical knowledge and the ability to find effective strategies for teaching each student
Additionally, because K12 schools are struggling with insufficient resources as reflected in the Mathematics and Science Partnership initiatives of the federal government and education budgets across the country, our program is designed, through work with library media specialists, publishers, and higher education institutions to increase the network of support for improvement.
Lastly, studies of systemic reform have often noted the effectiveness of professional development that is grounded in high quality instructional materials (Boyd, Banilower, Pasley, & Weiss, 2003). These findings are corroborated by the experience of the Math Forum. We receive frequent requests from teachers and schools for supplemental resources and professional education that are mapped to local standards, instructional objectives, and curriculum units. The subsequent impact of our workshops on the classroom appears to relate to both the immediate application of new material and also the teachers’ engagement with high quality mathematics and innovative technologies (Renninger & Shumar, 2002, 2004; Renninger, Weimar, & Klotz, 1998). We have also found that both the network of collaborators available to teacher participants (Little, 2001,2001; Renninger, Weimar, & Klotz, 1998) and the likelihood of effective interventions are strongly affected by the context in which teachers work (Anderson, April 2004). It is noteworthy then that less the 1% of media specialists, for example, are in a position to provide mathematics teachers with support (Mardis, in submission). It is critical that we are able to tailor workshop experiences and high quality online resources to match the particular situations for each of our audiences in this project (middle school teachers, library media specialists, college instructors, etc.) and provide contexts that support ongoing classroom integration and professional interactions.
Target Audience
At one level, the focal audience of this project is teachers of mathematics, arithmetic through calculus, with an emphasis on middle school. However, seen from another perspective, and one that the online community of The Math Forum reinforces, these teachers of younger students are part of an education system with interconnecting groups (Little, 1996; Renninger & Shumar, 2004) that must be addressed in order to be successful. The Math Forum is also in the fortunate position of having existing communities and a wide range of expertise among Math Forum participants and staff (e.g., teachers, trades people, mathematicians, students, etc.). The heterogeneity of the site, with its particular mix of those who have deep knowledge of mathematics and those who are in the process of building their understanding of mathematics or pedagogy, has enabled the site to support the efforts of many types of users. It is our experience that one of the key benefits of the Math Forum is the support for participants to evolve roles through a variety of interconnected services, including opportunities for cognitive apprenticeship and interactions with colleagues who bring experience from many domains (Renninger & Shumar, 2002). This evolution, or changed sense of possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) enables higher mathematics to inform elementary instruction and advanced technologies to develop in directions that are more useful to the teacher in the classroom.
It is also our experience that collaborations work best when both sides find their core interests are served and are equally invested in the results (Webb & Palincsar, 1996). The current state of development of the NSDL, and indeed the larger online mathematics education setting, is such that the opportunities for project-level collaborations that are most promising are also fairly well distributed across audience types (middle school teachers to college professors, library media specialists to curriculum authors). Thus we are able to both meet our strategic goal of cultivating a rich and diverse user community and the opportunistic objectives of leveraging the activity and resources of effective partners in order to accomplish much more than would otherwise be possible. In a sense it is both the collaborating NSDL partners and the educators they reach who are the audience for this project. These include:
Calculus Consortium: primarily college and AP calculus teachers Center for Technology in Learning (CTL): primarily middle and high school standards-based assessment resources and professional development College Board: AP math teachers DLConnect: underserved middle school math teachers and students Eisenhower National Clearing House (ENC): current emphasis is on PreK-8 but their workshops cover math and science teachers at all levels Excel User Group: initial focus on college level mathematics faculty and students Learning Space Project: pre-service teachers, para-professionals, and community college and higher education faculty involved in course development for pre-service programs Math Forum schools and projects: a wide range of audiences, primarily middle and high school teachers including: a regional MSP project focused on implementation of NSF-funded curricula (MSPGP), contracted in-service programs, pre-service teacher education programs through the TRAILS and Online Mentoring Guide projects, the Drexel University–School District of Philadelphia Partnership focused on Everyday Mathematics, and Math Forum-led summer institute leadership programs Media Specialist program: school librarians and media specialists Mission: Algebra: TERC’s online program for middle school algebra teachers and district leaders MSPnet: the online learning community for the Math Science Partnership program Shodor: math teachers from rural, urban, and DoDDS schools Sketchpad User Group: primarily high school mathematics teachers TADRIOLA and Instructional Architect Projects: middle and high school teachers
Math Forum’s Workshop Experience and Results (See http://mathforum.org/workshops/ for workshop agendas, materials, and listings.)
The proposed project, through a number of different kinds of partnerships and a number of different types of workshops, seeks to draw on the Math Forum’s experience running workshops in order to find ways that local contexts for teachers and other users can be enhanced by participation in the NSDL. The linking of face-to-face workshops with virtual workshops, support services, and instructional programs will help to build attachment to DL communities and allow teachers to use these resources to enhance their teaching. But also the community of practice functions as a kind of informal teacher professional development that can be profound. Critical to the future of the NSDL is the development of an active community of teachers who participate in different ways in the NSDL in general and in specific DLs in particular. Understanding how to leverage that participation and provide opportunities for teachers and students to learn and develop their own skills and interests is a complex matter.
While it is not much discussed officially, it is often the case that many teachers are resistant to professional development workshops that are held in their schools (Hargreaves, 1994; Little & McLauglin, 1993; Wasley, 1991). There are perhaps several good reasons for that resistance. First, teachers may be intimidated by what they don’t already know. Often times professional development workshops ask them to use skills or quickly learn skills that they are not in a place to master. One response to that demand is to find ways to creatively resist the demand. Just as when students resist learning new things, there is a potential lost: the potential of succeeding. But what is preserved is one’s sense of integrity and one’s identity, which in a school setting could be critical to maintain (Hargreaves, 1994; Grimmett & Neufeld, 1994).
Secondly, teacher professional development workshops are often “top down. ” They frequently come from the district and school administration and represent what others think needs to be done. These ideas are often good but they rarely connect with the situated knowledge of the teacher, and so often feel like a waste of time to many teachers. Teachers have a powerful “on the ground” understanding of what goes on in classrooms and the kinds of cognitive dilemmas their students face. So they feel that if workshops don’t address these issues, they are not worth the time (Flowers, Mertens, & Mulhall, 2002). Sometimes administrators have a similar sense to the teacher as to what the needs are but, because they live in very different cultural contexts, they use different words to explain what they think is going on and then fail to see eye to eye (Gee 1997). The Math Forum has explored a combination of face-to-face workshops coupled with technology and then followed up by online workshops and support services to overcome some of these classic problems of teacher professional development.
Results from recent the PIDL workshop (Giersch et al., 2004) demonstrate that participant involvement in the NSDL is a complex phenomenon. There are lots of issues to think about in terms of how to gain the attention of participants, provide them with something they need and then encourage their usage of resources and participation in the DL. The first issue is to figure out what it is that teachers need. This cannot be done in a general way. It requires working with specific teachers in specific subject areas. But once needs have been identified, getting teachers to change their practice so that the resources and participant community of the NSDL can help their work is still difficult. That is because changing practices, even if good for the individual, is complex. It involves overcoming existing schemas people have for doing their work that have grown out of their day-to-day performance demands. It also involves the development of new culture for a group of teachers at a couple of levels. First, the culture of the DL and the NSDL as places to learn and work with colleagues has to be encouraged and seen as a positive good. Second, a culture that encourages individual initiative and innovation has to be internalized by the individual and tolerated by the school.
Face-to face workshops and personal, online support can create a sense of belonging and move people to commit to different projects. This is especially true if those workshops are done well and include good context, support for using technology, and they model innovation. But the face-to-face wears off under the pressures of people’s local contexts. This is where the Math Forum tradition of face-to-face workshops followed by personal online support in a larger community helps to capture the identity of the participant and creates a sense of belonging to community and increased skill and competence as that individual becomes a respected professional within the community.
The Math Forum began holding workshops for teachers in the early days of the Internet
Important characteristics of the workshop include their democratic focus. They are participant driven in the sense that Math Forum staff members recognize that teachers know their local contexts and needs, but sometimes need help articulating the pedagogical and mathematical problems that they face. The workshops typically involve a feed-forward system of feedback, meaning that data are collected prior to the workshop and used to tailor the workshop to the participants. In addition, reflection is built into all aspects of workshop activity, expecting participants to have input, and can be heavily scaffolded, as necessary, in order to demonstrate to teachers that they (a) can solve math, technology, and pedagogical problem, (b) ask questions, and (c) use the site to find resources (Renninger & Shumar, 2004).
Another critical characteristic for the workshops is the hands-on emersion in using the digital library and learning community for authentic tasks. Thus a key result is that the library grows directly in terms of the online materials, discussions, and mentoring that takes place in the workshops and subsequent follow through.
These opportunities to work closely with participants have also informed site build out and service refinement. For example, work with 20 schools that were part of the Urban Systemic Initiative enabled the site to meet the needs of a very different and more mathematically and technologically challenged population of users than they had worked with previously. A sign of the Math Forum’s success was the vote, post-funding, to direct teacher-inservice monies to continued work with the Math Forum.
There are several lessons that the Math Forum has learned from their workshop experiences with teachers that have important implications for the research in the proposal and for the NSDL in general. First, a qualitatively different set of relationships can be established in the coupling of face-to-face workshops and online work (discussions, email, etc.) that follows. In both the BRAP (Renninger & Shumar, 2003, 2004) and the ESCOT projects (Shumar, 2003) we saw that norms and roles were established in the face- to-face workshop that facilitated participants’ abilities to work online. The norms of the group that were established were brought to the virtual context and were carried forward into teachers' subsequent activity as participants, and on the site more generally. It also appears, not surprisingly, that face-to-face meetings encourage affective ties. The emotional bonds that the teachers established solidified their commitment to the projects and helped participants to see the work and their role in this work as important. Further, in addition to solid connections to the other participants, services of the site were customized to the needs of individual teachers and their individual work context meaning that the site became established in the participants’ everyday practice.
The support is responsive in the sense that it leads participants to ask and seek answers to questions. The site is also responsive to the way the teachers perceived their needs and the direction of the project(Renninger, Weimar, & Klotz, 1998; Renninger & Shumar, 2004). Site responsiveness to participants is not about giving answers or telling; rather, it is inquiry-informed (Bruner, 1976). Site services and interactions on the site, and the workshops that the site staff conduct are purposefully designed to enable participants to ask questions and develop the abilities to find answers, collaborate with others in this process, and support users to think and learn (Renninger & Shumar, 2004). Importantly, workshops on the site have also had a particular focus and goal (Slavin, 19). These foci have always grown out of the practices of the teachers and the new communities they formed. The ability to facilitate workshops that start with and draw out participants’ strengths and impact mathematical, pedagogical, and technological thinking of participants (Renninger & Shumar, 2002, 2004), on the other hand, is informed by research on how people learn, reform pedagogy in mathematics (RAND, 2003), knowledge of mathematics (Shulman, 1996, 1997), and direct experience working with students in classrooms. All of the educational staff of the Math Forum have had classroom experience.
Project Goals
Workshops and other forms of outreach to users can serve multiple purposes and benefit both the users and the digital library in many ways. We will implement a program of workshops and develop user communities that support participant involvement in digital libraries across the functions of online content development, reference and mentoring services, site design, rating and review of digital resources, assessment, research, and outreach (all related to strands identified at our recent NSDL workshop on Participant Interaction in Digital Libraries, Giersch et al., 2004). We will develop models of face-to-face interaction that drive online development and sustainable communities while significantly improving the educational impact of digital libraries. Although our main work is focused on the usage development workshop category, we will also address other types of services such as selection, push-pull resource delivery, and collaborative virtual work environments. We expect this to both strengthen our Math Tools project and also to increase our impact on other projects.
One of the results of our program will be models that take into account critical factors in determining effective workshop programs and participant involvement including the functional focus of the participant involvement, the category of users (teacher educators are an important group, in addition to K-12 students and teachers themselves), and the stage of development of the digital library.
In the interest of exploring a range of models for organizing user support and involvement, we will also work with a few commercial products and look at the nature of the online support they require by developing user groups for particular products that are ripe for inclusion in our library. Again, workshops will play a central role in this process. We will be working with publishers to see if we can develop a model in which they increasingly invest in support of these user groups and the workshops we lead, beginning with a financial and personnel contribution toward the proposed work. This work should also be of value to NSDL as a new possible direction for some projects, along with our experiences in working with these user groups.
Project Design
The proposed workshop program is uniquely situated to reach a large number of teachers and increase the impact of NSDL in the classroom. Professional development programs are often criticized for being limited interactions aimed at a general audience rather than targeted efforts defined by the needs of the participants and involving them in an ongoing, outcome-based program that fosters continuous improvement (Killion, 1999; Hirsh, 2000; Guskey, 2000). As documented in the recent NSDL research meeting, Participant Involvement in Digital Libraries (PIDL), hosted and organized by the Math Forum, the expectation that “if we build it, they will come” is likely to fall flat unless certain key principles are followed including:
• Take advantage of existing contexts where teachers are already seeking support for professional goals and developing digital resources. • Bring the digital library to the teachers rather than assuming they will come to you, which means both doing outreach to teachers and using popular Internet education sites such as The Math Forum to bring users to other new and less well known NSDL resources. • Situate resources in the local objectives and standards driving professional activity. • Use evolves over time and impact on the classroom depends on opportunities for continuous and varied forms of engagement and participant roles.
In light of the above we will conduct a range of workshops that are:
• content-specific, where participants are learning their subject area (e.g. algebra) and not just about Internet resources • experience-based and hands-on so that participants learn by doing and leave the workshop setting capable of continuing their activity • designed around specific forms of participant DL involvement in order to effectively bridge the workshop setting to online activity for continued professional development and growth of the online library and community • conducted with partners who have strong programs and audiences for which the digital resources of Math Forum and associated NSDL projects are well-suited and cover the range of key stakeholders: teachers, publishers, mathematicians, school library media specialists, professionals in the workplace, software developers, professional development leaders, curriculum developers, and members of systemic initiatives.
We will work with three different kinds of workshop settings: - integrating MathTools and other Math Forum modules into the workshops of collaborators; - conducting Math Forum-hosted workshops with partner schools, teacher education programs, and for online leadership development; and - facilitating user group meetings focused on new areas within the Math Tools collection.
Collaborators’ workshops: As indicated in the collaborator descriptions below, many of the partners conduct their own workshops into which our components will be integrated. The model for this process will draw on four activities that are adapted to each context: an initial meeting with the professional development leaders at the collaborating organization where we conduct a mini workshop in our respective modules, joint planning for integrating components, co-presenting a workshop for the target audience, and coordination of online support materials and programs for follow-through. Our collaborators host approximately 250 workshops in which we will attempt to integrate Math Forum and other NSDL components.
Math Forum-specific workshops: There will be three main types of Math Forum activities: - Contracted school programs: We will add to our current school offerings the workshops that evolve from this project’s collaborations. Many of these will have the advantage of being available to schools for only the costs not covered by the grant such as travel and materials. In this way we will transition these new offerings into our contracted services paid out of local budgets. Some funds are built-in to the proposal budget to cover travel costs for schools serving underrepresented populations and that have not budgeted for this type of program. Based on current demand and capacity, we expect to offer at least three per month. - Summer Leadership Institutes: We will rekindle the highly regarded Math Forum summer institute program with a week-long program each summer aimed at cultivating the teacher leaders who have emerged from online activity and onsite workshop programs. The goal is to develop these individuals as potential workshop leaders and online facilitators, a strategy we have used successfully to build the Math Forum community over the years. - Virtual workshops and online support services: We will use TappedIn and the Math Forum to host both standalone virtual workshops and online complements to face-to-face workshops. In addition, we will provide follow up support services in which workshop users have priority access to mentoring through Teacher2Teacher, Teacher Exchange lesson plan support, Problem of the Week mentoring for their students, Math Tools consultations, and math help through Ask Dr. Math. Specific follow-up modules will be developed for each audience and type of workshop and incorporated into the workshop experience to build momentum for continuing professional education.
User Group Meetings: The Math Forum will host workshops and meetings at conferences and through virtual where we enable leading users and authors of Excel, Sketchpad, and the Calculus Consortium Calculus text to conduct sessions for other users. Monthly online events hosted through TappedIn and Math Tools will feature research presentations, regular help sessions, and demonstrations of classroom activities and materials.
One of the key strategic elements of this proposal and the Math Forum approach in general is to build a network and enrich a wider community of leaders so that effective professional development that is specific to NSDL mathematics and mathematics software resources for teachers is distributed across the many strong initiatives available to schools.
The following collaborators illustrate the range of audiences and digital library participant involvement that the workshops will support: materials rating and reviews, alignment with standards, classroom experiences, mentoring, discussion facilitation, contributed lessons and activities, software design requirements, site design, and development of alternative assessments.
Shodor Foundation: We will conduct workshops with the Shodor Foundation, a valuable partner in growing Math Tools with its collection on online applications. Shodor works K-12 schools located in urban areas such as Durham, NC and Boston, MA; rural areas such as Clinton, SC; Washington County, NC; and Iredell County, NC; and varied districts such as Henrico County, Virginia; and DoDDS Europe. We will follow their co-teaching model and make videos of co-teaching lessons, some of which would be placed on the web. Users will share classroom experiences and ratings and reviews of resources.
The Instructional Architect: As part of our work we will use the NSDL-funded Instructional Architect (IA), an Internet-based service designed for use with educational digital libraries by providing a "container" environment for resources found in a library (and especially tailored for learning resources located with the National Science Digital Learning). In particular, it enables users to discover, select, sequence, annotate, and reuse learning resources stored in digital libraries to make lesson plans, study aids, and homework. At the same time, it helps foster communities of teachers and learners who use the NSDL by supporting resource sharing and recommendations. We will incorporate the Instructional Architect into our workshops and users will contribute their developed materials.
We also plan to collaborate with the complementary NSDL workshop services project being submitted by the IA team, Mimi Recker and Jim Dorward, Utah State University, entitled "DLConnect: Connecting underserved teachers and students with NSDL learning resources and tools." We plan to share our workshop models to help expand the range and our understanding of participant involvement. As appropriate, we will co-develop and share research instruments such as surveys, structured interview protocols, and video coding schemes with other interested researchers. Data from our studies will be shared and, as such, will help corroborate and anchor the interpretation of findings for workshop implementation.
The College Board: The Math Forum will work with the College Board to test our participant involvement models with AP workshops. These workshops will be conducted by trained AP consultants in conjunction with Math Forum staff and tailored to meet the professional development goals of AP workshops. In addition, attendees will learn of the AP sections of the NSDL Math Tools site and will take part in activities aimed at developing useful AP support materials on this site. Reciprocally, the Math Forum will invite AP consultants to participate in Math Forum workshops serving teachers who could profit from an AP presence at the workshop. This work will strengthen our work with the Calculus Consortium, discussed under User Groups.
In addition, AP Central has just begun a series of online workshops, and Math Forum personnel will participate in some of these. It is also possible that the Form might become active in AP consultant training and in their week-long Summer Institutes. Once the Math Forum modules and trainers have achieved a level of performance and reliability, the College Board has indicated it would pay for these services.
Learning Space Project: Sarita Nair of EDC is developing the NSDL Learning Space (LS) and will construct a series of on-line guided explorations/tutorials that help users navigate the NSDL, construct search queries, make meaningful, contextual use of its resources, and provide links to relevant content standards. This project will develop and conduct a series of professional development/Train-the-Trainer workshops—for in-service and student teachers, para-professionals, and community college and higher education faculty involved in course development for pre-service programs—to promote awareness of the NSDL using the LS, and provide targeted training on how to incorporate its content into their education and work.
The Math Forum will work with the LS project on these workshops and help them develop ways to introduce Math Tools and other NSDL math resources. The Math Forum will also include LS staff in the development of modules building on our teacher education projects: TRAILS, a collaboration with Colorado and SRI focused on computer science and math education students, and Online Mentoring Program, involving the use of mentoring in Problems of the Week for pre-service teacher education. The LS project plans case studies that examine use of the LS and NSDL with different audiences, and we will discuss with them ways of assisting them with our own research and vice versa.
Mission: Algebra Collaboration: Under sponsorship from NEIRTEC, TERC has created a website, Mission: Algebra, that aims to support teachers and district leaders in the use of technology for middle grades mathematics teaching and learning. The Mission: Algebra website takes a very close look at a small number of online applications, describing the value of the technology for mathematics learning and taking an in-depth look at the tool being used by a skilled teacher in the context of a standards-based lesson. We will be cross-referencing between Math Tools catalog and Mission: Algebra. TERC will add references to Math Tools in "Using this site.” Jointly we will work with district leaders to improve middle grades mathematics instruction using digital resources. TERC is also eager to collaborate on conceptualizing the research program and collecting data to address the underlying research question: How can we make professional development experiences for teachers most effective? Users will contribute to site design and software requirements.
Center for School Reform and MSPnet: Joni Falk is a member of an NSDL project along with Ellen Hoffman and Marcia Mardis that investigates how middle school science and math teachers can make effective use of NSDL. Next year they will be working with a subset of math and science teachers in each of their districts to see how they can develop lessons from NSDL that they will then pilot in their classes. They have invited the Math Forum to join them as their math resource, including the use of math software tools. These classroom experiences will be shared with the Math Tools community. In addition, Joni leads the online network for Math Science Partnerships (MSPnet) and we will host virtual conferences on their site and feature work that we are doing with MSPs such as the curriculum supplement project with MSPGP < http://mathforum.org/tlc/mspgp/> that integrates MathTools content.
The TADRIOLA Project: The Math Forum will work with Larry Cannon, Joel Duffin, and Robert Heal of Utah State University and their web-based authoring tool TADRIOLA (Teacher Assistant for the Design and Reuse of Interactive Online Learning Activities). Their National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is one of the current collaborators in the Math Tools project. We will incorporate the TADRIOLA tool in some of our workshops and they will build Math Tools into their programs. In addition, they have a new IMD grant that includes development of tools to support forms of online lesson study. We will integrate the lesson study activity into The Math Forum collaboration with PCMI (Park City Mathematics Institute), also a recent recipient of an MSP grant. PCMI has a lesson study group as one focus of the online participant workshop follow-up and web project hosting that we conduct for them.
The Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) at SRI International will work with the Math Forum to incorporate standards-based assessment resources and professional development. CTL will work with Math Forum staff to adapt plans for brief and extended professional development sessions on performance assessment that were employed in the NSF-funded Performance Assessment Links in Science (PALS) project. These plans include face-to-face and online activities and materials for one-hour to one-day introductions to the use of performance assessments. The plans also include multi-day session designs and designs for one- to two-year ongoing professional development efforts. Assessment topics will include alignment of assessments, standards, and curricula; using, adapting, and creating assessments of complex performances; developing and using rubrics to evaluate student responses; and documenting the quality of assessments;
CTL will also assist The Math Forum to employ established methodologies for developing and documenting the technical quality of assessment tasks based on Technical Problems of the Week in order to engage workshop participants in the design and use of NSDL resources for authentic assessment programs. An initial set of these math assessment tasks would be shaped to meet criteria for sound assessment so that the assessments could be employed in accountability tests as well as curriculum- embedded classroom assessments. Technical quality methods will be addressed in assessment literacy components of the workshops.
Media Specialist Workshops: School librarians have a significant impact on achievement at all levels, (Rodney, Lance, and Hamilton-Pennell, 2003), yet they lack access to effective, field-tested strategies that will help them work effectively with mathematics educators (Mardis, 2003). The proposed work will foster closer collaboration between the media specialist and the math teacher by conducting sustained professional development experiences for school library media specialists and disseminating the results to the community. Workshop coordination, content development, conference presentation, and professional journal dissemination will be aided by former media specialist Marcia Mardis, an active member of both the NSDL and state and national school library communities.
The Math Tools site will establish a Media Specialist section where users can explore the connection between math education and school media programs, exchange insight on math curricula, gain direction on math resource collection development, and discuss effective collaboration ideas with math professionals. The online environment will act as a companion to and extension of the face-to-face learning opportunities. At two Michigan workshops, Fall and Spring of project Year 1, media specialists will be introduced to Math Tools resources and community, and collaborate the design of the new Section. The workshops’ goal will also be to develop leaders and facilitators to maintain the Media Specialist section of the Math Tools Web site.
Both the workshops and the online community will form the basis for papers in school library media specialist publications like Knowledge Quest (published by the American Library Association) and for national conference workshops and presentations in Year 2. These large-scale initiatives will expose the Media Specialist Section to a national community.
Eisenhower National Clearinghouse: ENC by itself does over 150 workshops each year for math and science educators. Current initiatives of ENC focus on organizing NSDL resources according local and national standards, particularly for PreK-8th grade audiences. The Math Forum will develop workshop modules jointly with ENC so that Math Forum users can participate in aligning resources with standards and ENC can offer experiences that deeply engage their teachers in the development of mathematical knowledge and effective use of related technologies. The Math Forum will collaborate with ENC on the NSDL K12 Task Force and will use ENC to help integrate Math Forum and Math Tools resources into the various NSDL portals through ENC’s OAI servers.
User Groups
The three user groups we will be working with offer a broad variety in user base formation and in publisher types. We will be learning from each group about effective relations with publishers and the role of special user communities in open digital libraries in supporting effective implementation and improvements for commercial products. We will publish reports on this experience to address the role of publishers in NSDL and the challenges of sustainability.
The Sketchpad User Group: Key Curriculum Press already has an online resource center that it would like to improve and we will be working together to design a user community that will use our Math Tools digital library to enhance their offerings. Geometer’s Sketchpad and Fathom are two of the new breed of dynamic mathematics applications that will be featured in Math Tools. The user group site will contain email discussion groups, new-user support, answers to technical questions, and news releases. We will catalogue Sketchpad and Fathom resources in the Math Tools database. We will work with Key to recruit facilitators and to host online events to build on the discussion areas that we host for dynamic mathematics software. Key Press has user functions at many national meetings and conducts many local in-service workshops. We will work jointly to develop NSDL modules for these programs.
Calculus Consortium User Group: Since the mid-90's, John Wiley & Sons has published a series of Calculus Consortium texts (a.k.a. Harvard Calculus, a.k.a. Hughes-Hallett). Originally funded by NSF, they have been flagships of the "calculus reform" movement, and the standard single variable calculus text is now in its third edition. The Consortium now consists of 22 members from a variety of institutions and they have published a number of other texts including multivariable calculus.
We will put together a special area of Math Tools devoted to the software used in Calculus Consortium books, support materials, community activities, and discussions. It will be organized around the sections of the texts. The Consortium seeks a mechanism for generating material from users. The Consortium has access to large numbers of experienced instructors who will form the base for facilitators and user contributors. The Consortium has also run workshops, in particular for advanced placement teachers and we will work with them to build in Math Tools components.
Excel Math User Group : There is little in the way of a cohesive web user base or existing publisher support for use of Microsoft Excel's in mathematics education, yet the time is ripe. There is a new book out on Mathematical Modeling with Excel by Neuwirth and Arganbright, a new journal on spreadsheets in education
The user group support would be similar to the previously discussed groups: an online area designed around contributed materials and professional forums along with workshops and face-to-face interactions at the main mathematics/technology conferences, such as ICTCM, AMS/MAA, and NCTM. This will give us valuable feedback from users, help recruit more to the community, and give the group non-virtual opportunities to form a community. We are separately submitting a proposal to Microsoft in order to built out this effort and associated research and have worked with Jane Chu Prey, University Relations Manager on this effort.
Dissemination
The many partnerships described above, including partnership networks such MSPnet, were selected in part to facilitate broad dissemination and reach of the project results. The Math Forum leaders are also extensively involved in NSDL committees. Steve Weimar is on the Policy, Sustainability, Evaluation, and Community Service committees. Gene Klotz is involved with the Nominating and Content committees. Both work with the NSDL Mathematics working group hosted by MAA and are frequently involved with digital library panels and meetings of other organizations. The Math Forum has hosted two workshops for the NSDL community, one on evaluation and one on participant involvement. Through these collaborations, activities and through published project reports to the NSDL community, they will make sure that results are shared with their immediate colleagues.
The Math Forum regularly presents research papers at AERA, NCTM, and other professional meetings and will continue to publish results in DLib and other journals.
Of course, The Math Forum itself is a strong vehicle for dissemination, with over 2.5 million visits a month, and we will promote workshop opportunities, project results, and the digital library materials of workshop participants.
Evaluation The Math Forum evaluation team of Wesley Shumar, ethnographer, and K. Ann Renninger, cognitive and education psychologist, will work with the Math Forum staff, Bethany Hudnutt (Shodor Foundation), and a research post-doc to use the occasion of the workshops to gather info on user information seeking behaviors and the ways they deal with NSDL objects when they encounter them on the web.
As part of the Math Forum’s formative evaluation effort we will investigate which participants get more involved in the DL and which show some change in practice. In particular we want to know whether there is a correlation with:
- having participated in a workshop, virtual or f2f - the workshop context (length, agenda, collaborating entity, format of the workshop, participant buy-in, etc.) - the type of participant involvement brought into the workshop - the nature and extent of the follow through and online engagement, particularly as this relates to what was done in the workshop
There will be two distinct parts to the evaluation of this project. 1) Documentation of the workshops conducted and the collaborations between The Math Forum and the partners, including the user group leaders. We will describe the change over time of the partnership activity and correlate this with descriptions of workshop activity and participant engagement. 2) An analysis of the impact of teacher workshops on teachers’ practices and change in practice. This aspect of the evaluation seeks to address the interplay between face-to-face workshops and online follow-up and support. Of additional interest is theimpact on teachers’ sense of their own professional skills and identity and any resulting change in teacher practice due to the workshops. Indicators to be studied include mathematical knowledge, teaching strategies, professional interests, or technology usage.
Part 1 Meetings between collaborators will be documented through participant observation. Further, on a three- month cycle, activities of the groups will be documented through an open-ended email survey asking participants to 1) present activities they have been engaging in on the project during a three-month period, goals that have been established, needs of the group and feedback on workshops and follow-up. This information along with participant observations will be assembled every three months and then summarized and available to project leadership and partners so that they can reflect on and adjust their own activity.
Part 2 We will use a formative, feed-forward process that will provide information about the impact of the workshop on: (1) Teachers’ own understanding of (a) concepts and processes involved in application of the tools or techniques to be studied, (b) technology concepts and strategies specific to each of the tools to be studied, (c) learning through collaboration, and (d) interest (including valuing). (2) Teachers’ understanding of their students’ understanding of (a) concepts and processes involved in application of the tools or techniques to be studied, (b) technology concepts and strategies specific to each of the tools to be studied, (c) learning through collaboration, and (d) interest (including valuing).
Independent variables will include: socio-economic status, gender, race, ethnicity, typing of teachers’ present pedagogical practices (as an index of teacher beliefs), school setting (rural, suburban, inner-city), and workshop type.
An email pre-workshop questionnaire will be distributed to all participants. Consistent with previous Math Forum workshop practices, the resulting data will be summarized and reviewed by workshop staff and project partners. This information will be used to adjust pedagogical elements of the workshop to the strengths, needs, experience, and interest of the participants. Participants will complete a post-workshop questionnaire distributed at the end of the workshop to participants. Workshop participants will be followed up six months after the workshop with an email survey asking about the impact of the workshop on teaching practice. All questionnaires will consist of both forced-choice and open-ended items.
At the completion of each workshop, change in (1) teachers’ own understanding and (2) understanding of their students’ understanding will be assessed. Within-subject analyses will be employed. Thus, the individual will be the unit of analysis and each person will serve as a control for him or herself. Participants who are involved in more than one workshop will have their participation tracked across the workshops.
A sample of six workshops in each year will be videotaped in order to get a more detailed analysis of the workshop process itself and to provide material for development of workshop models. The video analysis will look at level of teacher engagement with the workshop, level of comfort with the material presented in the workshop, and emotional connection to workshop group. Participating teachers will also be asked to submit 3 lesson plans and student data that could be studied as artifacts of the workshop. These materials along with the six-month follow-up questionnaire will be analyzed in conjunction with the video analysis to describe the impact that the workshop and its follow up activities have on classroom practices. The materials submitted by the teachers will be analyzed in conjunction with questionnaire data to consider the relation between the artifacts and the perceived understanding of concepts to be taught, use of tools, and abilities to assess and meet student strengths and needs (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser, 2001). These materials will also be reviewed for publication on the Math Tools site. Support for teacher publication of these materials will be provided by Math Forum staff members.
Sustainability
This project and the core collaborations were designed for a three-part model of sustainability. Sustainability depends to some extent on taking advantage of existing business models, while it is hoped that new strategies will also emerge from the projects activities. NSF funding enables the initial offering of the proposed workshops in order to build demand, develop reliable, high quality models, and research the impact of these programs. The projects activities are embedded within
Integration with existing programs. One of the benefits of developing programs jointly with partners such as ENC, College Board, TERC, EDC, and others is that even if other funding sources were to dry up, their professional development staff, existing client base, and business models are able to continue offering workshops that help teachers effectively use Math Tools, Math Forum, and NSDL mathematics resources.
School Contract and Subscription Fees: The Math Forum has a small, but steady base of paid contracts for professional development services to schools based on prior NSF-funded programs. This project will expand those offerings and build demand that will enable the new workshops and follow-up programs to continue as locally funded efforts. Additionally, the Math Forum has experimented with subscription services for advanced services in the context of its Problem of the Week program. These are several hundred subscribers and this program is expected to continue and to incorporate new elements based on the follow-up services of this project.
Community-led and Publisher Supported: The User Group component is designed to facilitate ongoing programs led by leading, largely volunteer members of the educational community with support from publishers. The goal is a combination of low-cost overhead in maintaining and supporting the community and publisher support for cultivating new users and building product effectiveness and support. We selected three different types of publishers (Wiley, Key Press, and Microsoft) in an effort to explore the range of publisher partnerships.
Key Staff
Principal Investigator, Eugene Klotz, will be responsible for overall project direction, project reports, the development and evaluation of mathematics materials, and, coordinator of user groups, publisher relations, and partner collaborations.
Co-Principal Investigator, Stephen Weimar, will work with Klotz on project coordination and will be in charge of the organization and content of the workshops and coordination with the evaluation team. Several Research Associates from the Forum staff who are part of the Forum Professional Development Team will work with Weimar to educate partners and conduct workshops.
Co-Principal Investigator, Wesley Shumar, will oversee and organize the project evaluation, working with his collaborator, Ann Renninger, and a supporting post-doc Research Associate supporting.
Consultant, Marcia Mardis, will help us design and conduct two state and one national workshop for media specialists, and write an article on our results. Mardis has a MILS and is the Director of Michigan Teacher Network, a digital library for K-12 educators, hosted at Merit Network, Inc at the University of Michigan. She teaches graduate educational media and technology courses and researches information seeking and school media issues at Eastern Michigan University and has published articles on K-12 Web use, edited Developing Digital Libraries for K-12 Education which documents the state of the art K-12 digital library practice. Mardis is an established leader within the NSDL community, currently serving as the Co-PI of a Core Integration project, lead PI of a Collections Project, and Co-PI on a Targeted Research project.
Consultant Bethany Hudnutt will work closely with us in giving a number of workshops (see narrative). She is the manager of the Shodor Foundation's Interactivate project and brings broad experience in conducting workshops for teachers along with experience in teaching school mathematics. Experiences and Capabilities of Principle Investigators Prof. Eugene Klotz teaches mathematics half-time at Swarthmore College and works half-time for the Math Forum, which he founded. He is currently heavily involved with the Math Tools project, from day- to-day activities, to giving presentations about the project, to using it in his own teaching. He is retiring as chair of the NSDL Nominating Committee.
Dr. Wesley Shumar is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Drexel University whose training is in cultural anthropology. He has studied institutions, identity, and community in a number of different educational arenas including at The Math Forum. Along with K. Ann Renninger, he co-edited the volume, Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Stephen Weimar is the Director of the Math Forum @ Drexel. He has worked with the Math Forum since 1993, when it was the Geometry Forum, and continues working to grow the digital library and supporting community. He is responsible for research and business development, operations, and program design of the Math Forum. He worked previously as a middle and high school mathematics teacher. He also developed a professional organization for teachers and conducted professional development and teacher education programs for ten years in critical thinking, conflict resolution, and problem solving. He is a member of the NSDL Policy Committee.