Developing and Investigating Unscripted Mathematics Videos

This project responds to the recent internet phenomenon of widespread accessibility to online instructional videos, which offer many benefits, such as student control of the pace of learning. However, these videos primarily focus on a single speaker working through procedural problems and providing an explanation. While the immense reach of free online instructional videos is potentially transformative, this potential can only be attained if access transcends physical availability to also include entry into important disciplinary understandings and practices, and only if the instructional method pushes past what would be considered outdated pedagogy in any other setting than a digital one. This project will use an alternative model for online videos, originally developed for a previous exploratory project, to develop 6 video units that feature the unscripted dialogue of pairs of students. The project team will use the filming and post-production processes established during the previous grant to create a repository of 6 dialogic mathematics video units that target important Algebra 1 and 2 topics for high school and upper middle school students, though the approach can be applied to any STEM topic, for any age level. They will also conduct 8 research studies to investigate the promise of these unscripted dialogic videos with a diverse population to better understand the vicarious learning process, which refers to learning from video- or audio-taped presentations of other people learning. Additionally, the project team will provide broader access to the project videos and support a variety of users, by: (a) subtitling the videos and checking math task statements for linguistic accessibility; (b) representing diversity of race, ethnicity, and language in both the pool of students who appear in the videos and the research study participants; (c) providing teachers with an array of resources including focus questions to pose in class with each video, printable task worksheets, specific ways to support dialogue about the videos, and alignment of the video content with Common Core mathematics standards and practices; and (d) modernizing the project website and making it functional across a variety of platforms.

The videos created for this project will feature pairs of students (called the talent), highlighting their unscripted dialogue, authentic confusion, and conceptual resources. Each video unit will consist of 7 video lessons (each split into 4-5 short video episodes) meant to be viewed in succession to support conceptual development over time. The project will build upon emerging evidence from the exploratory grant that as students engage with videos that feature peers grappling with complex mathematics, they can enter a quasi-collaborative relationship with the on-screen talent to learn complex conceptual content and engage in authentic mathematical practices. The research focuses on the questions: 1. What can diverse populations of vicarious learners learn mathematically from dialogic videos, and how do the vicarious learners orient to the talent in the videos? 2. What is the nature of vicarious learners' evolving ways of reasoning as they engage with multiple dialogic video lessons over time and what processes are involved in vicarious learning? and, 3. What instructional practices encourage a classroom community to adopt productive ways of reasoning from dialogic videos? To address the first question, the project team will conduct two Learning Outcomes and Orientation Studies, in which they analyze students' learning outcomes and survey responses after they have learned from one of the video units in a classroom setting. Before administering an assessment to a classroom of students, they will first conduct an exploratory Interpretation Study for each unit, in which they link the mathematical interpretations that VLs generate from viewing the project videos with their performance on an assessment instrument. Both types of studies will be conducted twice, once for each of two video units - Exponential Functions and Meaning and Use of Algebraic Symbols. For the second research question, the project team will identify a learning trajectory associated with each of four video units. These two learning trajectories will inform the instructional planning for the classroom studies by identifying what meaningful appropriation can occur, as well as conceptual challenges for VLs. By delivering learning trajectories for two additional units, the project can contribute to vicarious learning theory by identifying commonalities in learning processes evident across the four studies. For the final research question, the project team will investigate how instructors can support students with the instrumental genesis process, which occurs through a process called instrumental orchestration, as they teach the two videos on exponential functions and algebraic symbols.