Project Name: Re-imagining Video-Based Online Learning
PI: Joanne Lobato 
Funding: National Science Foundation Discovery Research K-12 Program, 2014-2017
 
The goal of this exploratory grant is to create, investigate, and provide evidence of promise for a model of online videos that embodies a more expansive vision of both the nature of the content and the pedagogical approach than is currently represented in most YouTube-style lessons. Rather than the procedurally-oriented expository approach of videos that dominate the internet, the videos produced for this project will focus on developing mathematical meanings and conceptual understanding. They will feature pairs of students, highlighting their dialogue, explanations, and alternative conceptions. 
 
Despite the tremendous growth in the availability of mathematics videos online, little research has investigated student learning from them. Consequently, a major contribution of this proposed work will be a set of four vicarious learning studies. Two qualitative studies will investigate the particular meanings and ways of reasoning that learners appropriate from observing the dialogue of the students in the videos, as well as the learning trajectories of vicarious learners for each unit. Two quantitative studies will isolate and test the effectiveness of the dialogic and the conceptual components of the model by comparing learning outcome gains for (a) conceptual dialogic versus conceptual expository conditions, and (b) dialogic conceptual versus dialogic procedural conditions.
 
This project is supporting a research assistantship for an MSED Ph.D. student, C. David Walters. 

See the website MathTalk.org (still under development) or watch the video below.