This project involves a longitudinal, ethnographic study of children's mathematical performances from preschool to first grade in both formal classroom settings and informal settings at school and home. The proposed site for the study is a small, predominately African-American pk-12 school. The study seeks to identify opportunities for mathematical learning by young children across multiple contexts, to map varied performances of mathematical competence by young children, to chart changes in young children's mathematical performance over time, and to design and assess the impact of case studies for teacher education that explore young children's mathematical competencies. Research questions focus on mathematical opportunities for learning in various contexts, children's development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions over time, the characteristics of competent mathematical performances, and the role of case studies in helping beginning teachers to understand young minority children's mathematical thinking. Data collected will include video tapes of classroom activities, written fieldnotes of formal and informal settings, student work, parent focus group transcripts, and children's interview performances. Analysis will involve both thematic coding and construction of case studies. The overarching goal of this project is to transform the ways that researchers think about and study the mathematical learning of young minority children as well as the quality of schooling these children experience.

The Video Mosaic Collaborative features  videos of student mathematics reasoning,  tools and services to encourage learning, research and practices fostering the development of student reasoning.  The VMC is a collection and service portal intended to support three primary audiences—teacher educators and their pre-service and in-service students, practicing teachers, and researchers.  The Video Mosaic Collaborative features a 22-year longitudinal study of students’ mathematical reasoning skills as they are developed from elementary through high school grades.  The VMC has been carefully designed to leverage the insights and strategies that can be mined in this extensive and unique video collection featuring observations, interventions and interviews with students solving mathematics problems in the classroom and in informal learning settings.  A careful metadata strategy was designed by the library and education research partners in collaboration to capture elements for searching that include forms of reasoning and heuristics, math strand, math problem, NCTM standards, grade level and type of educational environment.  Students and researchers are identified and can be individually tracked through the collection.  Transcripts, student work and dissertations resulting from the videos are linked in metadata.  Tools, such as the VMCAnalytic, a video annotation and analysis tool, are provided to enable registered participants to reuse the videos for instruction, study and research by creating personal clips and combining clips to accomplish research goals such as demonstrating changes in reasoning for an individual student studying probability over several video sessions.  Unlike other video annotation tool, the VMC analytic creates  XML-based independent resources that can be kept private in the researcher’s workspace but that can also be shared.  Shared analytics will be mined for keywords, which will retrieve the video(s) being analyzed, thus adding user tagging to the metadata for the videos.  The analytic resources created are not independently searched and displayed but will display as part of the context for the videos in the collection, along with student work, dissertations, and ultimately published articles, etc., all of which form the critical context of research and study surrounding each video.

Different search strategies, guidance in using videos and opportunities to consult or collaborate with others will be provided for each primary audience of the VMC.  The latest iteration of the portal, with collections and services available for immediate use, will be presented and demonstrated at the DRK12 Principal Investigators’ meeting poster session.  Visitors to the poster will be encouraged to search the portal and to create a small analytic, in a hands-on, interactive one on one demonstration.  We believe that the VMC makes a unique and significant contribution to the efforts of teacher educators, practicing teachers and researchers to discover insights and develop innovative strategies to support the development of student reasoning in mathematics education.