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  december 11, 2006
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campus newS

Nearly $1 million NSF grant will fund mathematics study
By Matthew Hunt
ugadawg8@uga.edu
Three UGA education researchers will study how mathematics teachers understand professional development, how that impacts their understanding of mathematics and what difference that makes to student learning.

The three-year project, which will begin in January, is funded by a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1 million. It will involve about 90 mathematics teachers from Atlanta Public Schools, a collaborating partner.

“These are important questions because little is known about the impact professional development has on teachers’ practices or on student achievement,” said Chandra Orrill, the project’s principal investigator and a research scientist in the College of Education’s Learning Performance and Support Laboratory.

Andrew Izsak, associate professor of mathematics education, and Allen Cohen, director of the Georgia Center for Assessment and professor of educational psychology, are co-principal investigators.

The research will look at the relationship between professional development and student learning in three key areas: What did the teachers learn in the professional development? Are there indications that the teachers’ practices changed as a result of participating in the professional development? Are there measurable changes in student understanding that can be attributed to teacher learning?

The UGA researchers will work with about 60 sixth and seventh grade math teachers participating in a 50-hour professional development program that concentrates on Number Concepts, one of the key foci of middle grades mathematics. This is the area that includes fractions, decimals, percents and proportions. Thirty teachers will be tracked as a comparison group.

The professional development program is one of several courses from the InerMath project, which was developed by UGA education researchers with previous NSF funds and explicitly designed to meet the needs of Georgia’s mathematics teachers.

The team will provide professional development experience for the teachers that will include assessments of their understandings as well as interviews about their teaching. The teachers also will be asked to administer a pre-test and post-test to their students focused on some of the critical mathematical ideas. A subset of the teachers will be asked to participate in subsequent case studies in which researchers will videotape their teaching for analysis.

The $999,958 grant, from the NSF’s Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering program, will help cover expenses for data collection and teachers’ participation in the workshops, as well as for researchers’ time to collect and analyze the data. The project also is expected to employ three graduate students.
 


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