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.
Related pages
Michal Yerushalmy, Prof.- researcher page
