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

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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. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by preK-12 students and teachers, through the research and development of new innovations and approaches. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for the projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.