Building A Teacher Knowledge Base For The Implementation Of High-quality Instructional Resources Through The Collaborative Investigation Of Video Cases

This is a Late-Stage Design and Development collaborative effort submitted to the teaching strand of the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK12) Program. This project will address the pressing national need to generate shared, practice-based knowledge about how to implement freely available, high-quality instructional resources (mathematics formative assessment lessons) that have been shown to produce significant gains in student learning outcomes. It will expand a professional development model (Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics using the Teaching for Robust Understanding Framework (AIM-TRU)) that supports teacher learning about effective lesson implementation. The backbone of AIM-TRU is a growing, open repository of video cases available to teachers and teacher educators across the U.S. who use or are interested in using the lessons. The repository will include tools such as a facilitator's guide to support teachers and teacher educators to engage in the model and collaboratively investigate the video cases. Consequently, the work will have the potential to engage teachers and teacher educators in improving mathematics education at scale. Because the video cases will capture implementation and ideas for improving instruction in schools serving populations who are underrepresented in mathematics, AIM-TRU will serve to improve mathematics education equitably.

Research questions focus on what teachers learn about high-quality mathematics instruction and instructional materials within a community of practice, and how that learning influences their teaching. In AIM-TRU, teachers engage in the collaborative investigation of video cases utilizing a shared repertoire that includes questioning protocols adapted from the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework. This framework articulates five dimensions of classroom instruction that are necessary and sufficient to support students in becoming powerful mathematical thinkers. This affords teachers opportunities to use the TRU dimensions as lenses to diagnose common problems of practice that arise in implementation, and propose innovations and theories for improving instruction that can be tested in real classrooms and documented in new video cases. Analytic tools will be used from frame analysis to produce empirical evidence of what teachers are learning about instruction and instructional materials along the five dimensions of TRU. These data will be mapped to a random sample of video recordings of participating teachers' instruction, scored using the TRU Math Rubric, in order to link learning outcomes from the professional development to changes in instruction. Addressing these research questions will provide a deeper understanding and empirical evidence of learning within teacher collectives, the pressing national need to develop mechanisms to produce collective professional knowledge for teaching, and further efforts to understand the types of knowledge required for effective teaching.

The DRK-12 Program seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed 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.