Novice teachers require support in learning to attend and respond to students’ thinking as expert teachers do. Video clubs in which groups of teachers respond to videos of one another’s classrooms can help. Van Es and Sherin describe how a video club helped teachers make space for student thinking to emerge, probe students’ understanding, and learn from their students while teaching.
Lobato, Rhodehamel, and Hohensee investigated how learners “transferred” knowledge from one situation to another. They found that both individual cognition and the social organization of the class drove the learners’ process of selecting, interpreting, and working with particular features of mathematical information. They also found the social arrangements of the class influenced what pieces of information students noticed and focused on.
Formal readings and lectures are effective at delivering explanations, but the information they impart can be so densely packed and de-contextualized that students may not make full sense of the content. Arena and Schwartz found that video games have the potential to unlock the expository content delivered by lectures, textbooks, and diagrams.
Researchers examined whether engineering activities and lessons can help students apply science and math content in real-world contexts and gain insights into the professional activities and goals of engineers.
The authors of this study investigated the educational potential of a digital math game called Zombie Division in an elementary classroom. Habgood & Ainsworth were interested in the effect of what they called “intrinsic integration” –linking the video game’s core mechanics of play to the educational content. The idea is linked to the field of research called intrinsic motivation, in which the only reward is pleasure in the activity itself. The researchers argue that, while a game like MathBlaster is fun, it does not embody the mathematics lesson as an intrinsic part of game play.
Researchers Jurow, Hall, and Ma examined how conversations and interactions between students and STEM professionals expanded students’ understanding of math modeling.