STM-RD.htm

M a t h S c a p e : Seeing and Thinking Mathematically		Description
		Materials
		RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Research and Development

ABOUT THE DEVELOPERS

MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically was developed in part by the Seeing and Thinking Mathematically project (STM), based at Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), a non-profit educational research and development organization in Newton, MA. The STM project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 9054677). Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation. Click here for a complete list of the MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically units.

The STM project was built upon EDC's 40-year history of developing educational materials, including PSSC Physics, ESS Science, The Infinity Factory television series, Insights Science, The Geometric Supposer software series, My Travels with Gulliver, and many other curriculum, software, and video products.

The Seeing and Thinking Mathematically units were designed to fully address current standards and recommendations for teaching middle school mathematics. The Seeing and Thinking Mathematically project involved international collaboration with:

The Shell Center for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham, England, whose contributions were based upon many years of research and development underlying materials such as The Language of Functions and Graphs.
EdMath of Victoria, Australia, whose staff built upon years of research and development producing materials such as the Mathematics Curriculum and Teaching Program (MCTP) materials. Inverness Research Associates of California provided consulting on the design of the research processes used in the project and conducted research for several of the units.

ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The Seeing and Thinking Mathematically project incorporated many formative research activities to assist the developers in designing materials that are mathematically clear and pedagogically effective with diverse populations of students. Some of these activities included summer institutes with middle school teachers, consultations with experts on teaching mathematics to students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, reviews of the research on children's learning of mathematics, input from many consultants and advisors, and classroom testing of activities in which the project staff and teachers worked closely together. These research activities helped to define the design principles used throughout the curriculum.

Building on these principles, initial versions of each unit were then carefully tested in a variety of classrooms, ensuring feedback from multiple teachers and diverse groups of students. Project researchers conducted weekly classroom observations and teacher interviews. Student work was collected and analyzed to evaluate the lessons and identify common student misconceptions. The project researchers and curriculum developers used this extensive field-test data to revise and improve the units. The field-test teachers' classroom experiences and suggestions were also incorporated into the final units in the form of "From the Classroom" notes and "A Teacher Reflects".