MERI – home for research & development of innovative technology for teaching and learning

The Mathematics Education Research and Innovation Center (MERI), headed by Dr Shai Olsher and Prof. Michal Yerushalmy, is dedicated to exploring how technology can help improve mathematics education - through novel ways of learning and teaching. MERI’s research team explores the roles of technology in this process, striving to understand how technology relates to broader educational factors. The research team at MERI invests extensive resources into innovating technologies that support mathematics education for teachers and students in schools and universities.

STEP- Descriptive automated assessment

Seeing The Entire Picture [STEP] is a task-based automated online formative assessment platform that facilitates mathematical inquiry. The tasks are designed to elicit examples (ExampleElicitingTasks EETs ) based on the use of interactive diagrams (IDs). STEP submissions consist mainly of examples, each one an instance created with the ID of the task and stored on the platform. The collection of outcomes, including the personal example spaces of individual students and the collective example space of the entire group, can be analyzed online and filtered according to specified criteria (Olsher, Yerushalmy, & Chazan, 2016).

Research based implementation

Through the STEP platform, teachers can prepare assignments that encourage the students to meaningfully engage with mathematics, immediately see each of the students’ work and receive visual analyses of their solutions. STEP also analyzes the student’s working methods, so that even partial solutions submitted by the student are used to present recommended work methods and illuminate creative and diverse answers for the same assignment.

The STEP platform is implemented with the use of personal devices (mobile phones, tablets, laptops, personal computers) and provides the teacher with dashboards - automatic and accessible analyses of the students’ answers to open tasks and interactive views of large groups.

MERI - Mathematics Education Research and Innovation Center website