New $1.8 Million NSF Grant to Support NC State Education Project on Math Teacher Preparation
NC State College of Education Professor Hollylynne Lee and a cross-institutional team will receive $1.8 million over five years as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant for her work entitled “Preparing to Teach Mathematics with Technology – Examining Student Practice [PTMT-ESP].”
This award is the fourth NSF grant to support the PTMT project since 2005, and it will extend its research and development cycle until 2023.
PTMT-ESP brings together a cross-institutional team — Jennifer Lovett from Middle Tennessee State University, Allison McCulloch from UNC-Charlotte, and Charity Cayton from East Carolina University — to continue working to help preservice mathematics teachers prepare to utilize students’ mathematical thinking in technology-rich environments.
Lee and her team plan to create, refine and study video-enhanced materials to use as curriculum materials for preservice high school mathematics teachers. These materials will give those teachers authentic engagement with students learning mathematics.
“There is a dearth of video-based materials available to mathematics teacher educators that focus on secondary students,” said Lee. “Our project will contribute research results, and research-based materials to advance the field of mathematics teacher education and prepare future high school teachers to enact student-centered pedagogies for teaching algebra with technology. I am thrilled to have this strong cross-institutional team taking the PTMT project forward!”
The PTMT portal — used by 450 university faculty and other teacher professional development providers — houses all materials developed by the project and is available to users for free as part of the professional learning Place at the Friday Institute of Educational Innovation.
The current iteration of the project builds off the success of prior work and will expand the PTMT portal to include a series of video cases that illustrate ways high school students reason when solving algebraic tasks with dynamic technology tools that include multiple representations of algebraic objects and ways of interacting with those objects.
The research focused on students’ reasoning will be used to create video cases for preservice teacher education. The research will then continue to investigate ways preservice teachers are able to examine, make sense of, and plan interactions with students solving algebraic tasks with technology.
In addition to publishing the free high-quality web-based materials, faculty and graduate students associated with PTMT have contributed 27 refereed papers published in journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings, 5 dissertations/theses, and 53 conference presentations.
NC State Education Professor Karen Hollebrands has served as Principal Investigator and Co-PI in prior related studies to the PTMT project.
This post was originally published in College of Education News.
