The University of Colorado at Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin will receive $5.8 million to help understand and improve the way students learn and are taught algebra.
The five-year grant, nearly $3 million of which will come directly to CU-Boulder, is part of the Interagency Education Research Initiative, a national program developed by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The program's goal is to support promising research on educational practices that are meant to improve student learning and achievement in reading, mathematics and science.
"A major focus of our project is helping educators move research into practice in the schools," said Assistant Professor Mitchell Nathan of the CU-Boulder School of Education, and the project's principal investigator. "However, there also is a great deal of basic research that will happen as well."
To tackle the complex task of improving algebra education, the CU-Boulder-based project will focus on three main areas: student learning and development; teacher beliefs, knowledge and practice; and professional development of teachers.
As schools nationwide push for more complex mathematics like algebra to be taught in earlier grades, the disparities between the needs of students and the training of teachers have become greater, according to Nathan.
"Â鶹ÒùÔº' difficulties in learning formal algebra are well documented," Nathan said. "And studies like the Third International Mathematics and Science Study show that U.S. students drop significantly in performance relative to their international peers between fourth and eighth grade."
"Clearly we need a better understanding of how students' mathematical reasoning develops during the middle school years as well as the beliefs teachers hold about student reasoning that may affect their instruction," he said.
The funding for the CU-Boulder-based project will be used to help understand grade school students' transition from arithmetic into algebraic reasoning, a critical step in the students' mathematics education, according to Nathan. The researchers also will develop and evaluate new strategies to improve the learning and teaching of increasingly complex mathematics.
More than 1,500 students and their teachers from middle schools in Denver and Brighton, and others from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will participate in the project with university researchers.
Technology will play an important role in the project, Nathan said. Researchers will examine ways in which computers, telecommunications and video case-based technologies are used and can be used to support student learning and the development of professional communities of middle school mathematics teachers.
For example, part of the project involves developing computer mathematics tutoring programs to help students get "self-paced" instruction, which then frees up teachers to work with those who may need more help, Nathan said.
"These computer tutors can also emphasize things that may be difficult to do in the classroom," Nathan said.
Another goal of the project is producing videos of successful teaching techniques, which eventually will be used to create a video library that teachers can use as a reference tool on the Internet, he said.
Nathan said videos of innovative teaching and learning will help to expand teachers' current notions of the kinds of thinking students are capable of, while the Internet will allow teachers to easily access the information.
"We are asking teachers to think about teaching mathematics in middle school that used to be reserved for high school," he said. "We are also calling upon teachers to teach mathematics in ways that are very different than they were taught or trained."
The co-principal investigators from the CU-Boulder School of Education are Assistant Professors Haggai Kupermintz and Jeffrey Frykholm and Professor Hilda Borko. Professors Sharon Derry, Martha Wagner Alibali and Eric Knuth of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Professor Ken Koedinger of Carnegie Mellon University are also investigators.