SBIR Phase I: Mathemantics: Diagnostic Math Games for Kindergarten Children

SBIR 第一阶段：数学：幼儿园儿童的诊断数学游戏

• 批准号: 0944956
• 负责人: Paul Horwitz
• 金额: $ 14.93万
• 依托单位: Educational Network Services, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-01-01 至 2010-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0944956&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Mathemantics; Diagnostic; Math

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project builds on decades of math education research, most of which has failed to have much impact in ordinary classrooms. Our immediate objective is to create a rich mathematical world for young students to explore, within that world to pose developmentally appropriate challenges, to monitor children as they engage in problem solving, analyze their actions to make informed inferences regarding their learning, and use the results of that analysis to inform teachers and to make instructionally relevant suggestions. The project will observe students' interaction with Mathemantics in the absence of mentoring, looking for opportunities where such a mentor might usefully have intervened. Based on these observations, the project will add to Mathemantics a friendly computer-based avatar who will react to patterns of student actions and provide context-sensitive help and feedback. The project will aggregate student performance data and use it to generate formative assessments in the form of diagnostic reports to teachers. The underlying goal is to introduce knowledge gained from math education and cognitive science research into elementary classrooms by packaging it for teachers and students in a usable and actionable form.In prior work a sequence of prototype Mathemantics games was created. It was demonstrated that children found them engaging and that they learned important mathematical concepts from them, albeit in the presence of a graduate student who guided them and gave them feedback. Now the project proposes to demonstrate that with appropriate scaffolding these games can 'stand alone' so that children will understand them and find them motivating, and most of all that they will learn from them. It is also hopes that Mathemantics is capable of generating formative assessments that teachers find accessible and useful. These assessments will be aligned to mCLASS:Math, an application for handheld computers that guides teachers through 'clinical interviews' with individual students and analyzes data teacher-entered to produce diagnostic reports. Pending a successful outcome of this feasibility study, an enhanced version of mCLASS:Math will be produced which will offer suggestions for how to customize Mathemantics to meet the needs and match the abilities of individual students. By offering Mathemantics to classrooms already equipped with mCLASS:Math, we will have immediate access to an important 'early adopter' segment of the market.

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段研究项目建立在数十年的数学教育研究基础上，其中大部分研究在普通课堂上未能产生太大影响。我们的当前目标是为年轻学生创造一个丰富的数学世界，让他们在这个世界内进行探索，提出适合发展的挑战，监控孩子们参与解决问题的过程，分析他们的行为，对他们的学习做出明智的推断，并使用分析的结果向教师提供信息，并提出相关的教学建议。该项目将观察学生在没有导师的情况下与数学的互动，寻找这样的导师可能会有用地介入的机会。基于这些观察，该项目将为数学添加一个友好的基于计算机的化身，它将对学生的行为模式做出反应，并提供上下文敏感的帮助和反馈。该项目将汇总学生的表现数据，并利用这些数据以诊断报告的形式向教师生成形成性评估。其基本目标是通过将从数学教育和认知科学研究中获得的知识以一种可用的和可操作的形式包装为教师和学生，将其引入小学课堂。在之前的工作中，我们创建了一系列原型数学游戏。结果表明，孩子们觉得他们很吸引人，而且他们从他们那里学到了重要的数学概念，尽管有一名研究生在场，他指导他们并给他们反馈。现在，该项目提议证明，通过适当的脚手架，这些游戏可以“独立”，这样孩子们就会理解它们，发现它们具有激励作用，最重要的是，他们将从它们中学到东西。它还希望数学能够产生教师认为容易理解和有用的形成性评估。这些评估将与mCLASS：Math保持一致，这是一款掌上电脑应用程序，可以指导教师对个别学生进行“临床访谈”，并分析教师输入的数据，以生成诊断报告。在这项可行性研究取得成功结果之前，将编制增强版的mCLASS：数学，它将就如何定制数学以满足学生的需求和匹配个别学生的能力提供建议。通过向已经配备了mCLASS：数学的教室提供数学课程，我们将立即进入市场的一个重要的“早期采用者”细分市场。