PIs: Carolyn Maher, Cindy Hmelo-Silver, Grace Agnew, Susan Golbeck, Marjory Palius
Rutgers University New Brunswick
Award Details

This PI team is investigating three aspects of the use of video in education: i) how people learn with video, ii) the role of technology in supporting use of the vast corpora of video generated by decades of research, and iii) how video is used in generative ways to help focus learners on phenomena of interest. The researchers are basing their investigations on the Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC), a rich collection that includes video from multiple longitudinal studies of children’s mathematical reasoning, from urban, working class, and suburban communities in both classroom and informal settings, as children work individually and collaboratively on cognitively challenging math problems. The technological innovation of this project lies in the development of a tool for video selection and annotation, the VMCAnalytic. An analytic is a multimedia object that combines selected portions of video with accompanying text in a sequence of clips to yield a narrative for an intended purpose, which might include such objects as a lesson plan or an exploration of a research question. A critical design decision guides the development of this tool, to capture that information in a standard format that: i) could persist outside the tool, ii) is shareable and reusable in different formats (such as PDF with clickable video links), iii) is readily expanded and enhanced as researcher needs change, and iv) is recognized and treated as an information object in its own right. All developments are open-source, which widens the impact of the project. The project features two research and development cycles. The first cycle examines how college professors use analytics to create learning tasks for their students, and how their perception of what the analytic tool can do aligns with the research team’s initial socio-cognitive analysis. The researchers are also studying how learners engage with tasks that were designed (e.g., how they make explicit how learning develops or how teacher moves influence student outcomes), allowing the development of conjectures about how students learn through the multimedia construction tasks. From initial analyses of that data the research team seeks to understand what kinds of supports and scaffolds need development and implementation. The second design cycle then builds on the initial studies and tests some of these supports and scaffolds.