Tech Portfolio

Researchers : Prof. Michal Yerushalmy Dr. Shai Olsher

Background

Textbooks are a vital component in lesson preparation and pedagogical practice for mathematics teachers. As digital textbooks become more and more ubiquitous, teachers are coming to play a central role in curricular design, adding, removing and re-sequencing learning resources. This creates a critical need for tools that will support teachers in making informed curricular decisions.

Advancing Technology for Mathematics Content Development
The Mathematics Education Research and Innovation Center (MERI), headed by 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’s Edumap project aims to make content development and pedagogy tangible for mathematics teachers. The project is focused on developing tools that guide users in the underlying structure and didactic balance of textbooks, to support teachers in maintaining the coherence of their textbooks in the process of modifying them.

Edumap tools will enable teachers and developers to be better equipped to rethink their teaching using the learning resources that they consider relevant. This will be facilitated with advanced tools for:
1. Tagging mathematical and pedagogical aspects of existing digital learning resources
2. Analyzing and navigating collections of tagged resources
The system’s dashboard (based on Keshif technology) provides a tangible representation of the metadata for collections of tagged learning objects.
(An exposition of our work with the Keshif dashboard can be viewed on the Keshif blog.)

Research Status and Partnership Opportunities
A major challenge in mathematics education research is understanding how combinations of various categories of metadata can support teachers in making informed curricular decisions. Edumap approaches that challenge with a design based on a critical reading of relevant literature as well as extensive work with practicing and pre-service teachers.

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Related pages

Michal Yerushalmy, Prof.-  researcher page

STEP – Seeing The Entire Picture:Technology Empowering Formative Mathematics Teaching in the Classroom

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