Learning mathematics requires many theoretical lenses, including
mathematics education researchers, mathematicians, discourse analysts,
child developmental psychologists, learning scientists, and other scholars.
A fundamental goal of the work of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning
(RBDIL) is to advance the growth of knowledge about how individuals build
mathematical understanding. A primary commitment of the Robert B. Davis
Institute of Learning has been to develop and implement strategies to build
interdisciplinary communities, some of which encourage access to users of
the RBDIL video collections of mathematical teaching and learning.
This collection is a subset (about 400 hours) that is stored in the
Rutgers University Repository, Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC), and
available, open source, worldwide (Video Mosaic Collaborative).
The Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC) was built with an associated new
tool (RUanalytic), which enables a user to create a video narrative
(VMCAnalytic) and publish it on the VMC. These video narratives can be
used for research and instruction, and they can be linked to associated
scholarly work. The full collection of over 4500 hours of digitized videos
makes up the RBDIL library. The digital collection was made possible through
longitudinal and cross-sectional research studies with a long history of
support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
Neuberger Foundation. Recent NSF funding enabled the building of new
search tools.
Dissemination was extended to communities of Language, Mathematics,
Literacy, and Psychology research through presentations at scholarly
conferences and publications, including books and journals, as well as
published VMCAnalytics. During the last three years, with funding from
the NSF to Build Community and Capacity (BCC), there have been 37,281
videomosaic.org page views; 104,588 views/downloads of VMC content in
the repository; 60 published VMCAnalytics; and 175 registered VMC users
of the RUanalytic tool. These data exclude Rutgers University accounts.
The VMC is open source, and it is available worldwide.
The top ten countries accessing the VMC at present are the US, UK, Brazil,
China, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Germany, and Italy.
The ongoing work with the RBDIL video collection is dynamic, offering
new opportunities for collaborations within and outside the GSE.
It is anticipated that continued support for this work will be forthcoming
with expanded opportunities for further collaboration and building of
community.
The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning has built a unique video collection through research over a period spanning three decades about how children develop mathematical ideas and ways of reasoning. With funding from multiple grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, studies were conducted in a variety of settings and locations in New Jersey. The collection features the seminal Rutgers-Kenilworth longitudinal study, which followed the same cohort of children from first grade through high school and beyond. Also featured is a year-long study based in a 4th-grade classroom that focuses on children learning about fractions and rational numbers before any formal instruction per the school's curriculum at the time. The collection also features children from urban schools, with both classroom and after-school settings, including the Informal Math Learning study conducted over two and a half years with two cohorts of students and a cadre of teachers as participants in the research. In sum, there are over 4,500 hours of video in the collection. Mathematical content includes strands of counting-combinatorics, early algebra, fractions, probability, and pre-calculus. Our current work, Video Mosaic Collaborative, aims to preserve this unique collection and make it accessible broadly to researchers, teacher educators, and teachers.
See: www.videomosaic.org