Mathematical Behavior
The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning has worked with a variety of partners over extended periods of time to create conditions for learning environments that optimize students' understanding of the mathematics they are learning. Carolyn A. Maher, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education and the Director of the Institute, working with a small staff and a growing network of Research Associates, has been a national leader in the field. Maher's team has established a successful track record in conducting collaborative research and teacher development projects, increasing knowledge in the field and bringing it into the classroom. At the heart of the Davis Institute approach is the idea that a focus on deep understanding in mathematical problem solving is the key to increasing mathematics achievement. Research has shown that children have powerful mathematical ideas and ways of reasoning that develop over time. The Davis Institute's unique video collection includes over 4,500 hours of longitudinal and cross-sectional video data on children's learning and reasoning. This video collection is unique. It can serve as an important tool for teacher learning.
Learning mathematics is a complex process that requires many theoretical lenses, including those of 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) which 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 make 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: US, UK, Brazil, China, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, Germany, and Italy. The ongoing work with the RBDIL video collection is dynamic, and it offers 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 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, is aimed at preserving this unique collection and making it accessible broadly to researchers, teacher educators, and teachers.