The Math Forum
15 August 1996
Grant Proposal
Back to Table of Contents || On to Next Section
V. Our Strategy
Focus. Out of the tremendous span of activity of the Math Forum has emerged a strong strategic focus that will enable it to accomplish its far-reaching goal and meet the extensive needs outlined above with limited resources. At the heart of the Forum is a wide range of vehicles of communication that can sustain a community engaged in rich mathematical and educational activity, activity that is recorded and developed into ongoing resources for the world at large.
Instead of simply hiring staff to produce new resources, the Forum seeks to leverage the work already taking place in countless classrooms, offices, conference rooms, and virtual communities. Thus, over the next three years the Forum will concentrate its efforts on the application, scaling, and dissemination of the ways in which it is learning to exploit the use of Internet communications to integrate three key activities:
1) community-building across the many groups involved in math education,2) user construction, assessment, and organization of materials and projects, and3) online educational mentoring and professional development. Other needs identified above such as enhancing the Forum's resource collection, providing effective public forums, and deepening the involvement of professional organizations will be addressed within the context of these three focal activities.Partners and Efficient Collaboration. The nature of our effort to establish ourselves as a virtual math education center necessarily makes our project large and complicated. Many interconnections sustain us and we have subcontracted for assistance when needed. We cannot describe in detail here all of the relationships involved. You will find the key partners presented below and additional details are available in the accompanying letters of support. In setting up these various projects we have tried to engage the minimum number of partners necessary to touch the important bases, while at the same time striving to maximize interconnectivity. Although we may describe a given partner under one area of activity, it is important to recognize that each project has been designed to integrate work across the three main areas mentioned above. In order to manage the complications inherent in such an endeavor, we have looked for strong and independent partners who lack only some Internet or educational resources that the Forum could provide.
Sustainability. Our work with partners will be a key element in pulling together a consortium to manage a division of the Forum as an Internet Research & Development agency available to support math education providers' online efforts. By the end of this three-year project, we expect that organizations aimed at teachers and teacher education will have extensive Web sites, and that there will be a variety of providers of math materials working in consonance on the Internet. Our working collaborations with NCTM, MAA, and Eisenhower, and our facilitation of the informal organization of Internet math providers should lay the groundwork among the major players.
We have asked each of the major groups and organizations with which we will work to select a member for our Board of Advisors, which will meet in the late spring of each year. In the first year we will concentrate on establishing productive relationships that will meet the needs of each potential partner and the Board will focus on providing feedback on the program and on our progress toward developing effective relations with the key players.
In our project description (below) are a number of references to our plans to turn over our mature projects to others. We also envision several approaches for generating income. Key Curriculum Press is negotiating a contract with us to construct a Web site for its Interactive Math Program, and we plan to expand on our experience with this project to do more contract work. We will collaborate with ETS on a professional development project and have made clear that we wish to learn from them about running an education business. We will monitor progress in Internet pay-per-use schemes for materials and services created under the auspices of the Forum, and will investigate the possibilities of generating income through a for-profit professional development program (summer workshops, in-service programs, and distance learning courses).
In the second year, as our projects attain some stability and we begin to focus more on dissemination, the Board will help us with outreach, assessing which relationships are viable elements around which a consortium can be formed, and putting together a plan of action in which the consortium is created, mature projects are spun off, fee-based contracts are negotiated, and new research plans and proposals are developed. In the final year the Board will support our efforts to implement our plan of action. The process of establishing this consortium while conducting our research and development program will require a full-scale effort over the three years of the grant and thus no significant decrease is reflected in the budget over that time. It is important to realize, however, that in the fourth year, the bulk of the budget and activity of the project will be managed and funded by the consortium with some portions taken over by other organizations.
Evaluation. In a sense, although we have produced some programs and resources, this project is primarily a research and development effort because the main goal and focus is not the building of a virtual center, but what we can contribute to knowledge about reform of math education through the provision of high quality online resources and support. The Math Forum evaluation material that has been included with this proposal clearly documents how, in spite of the small proportion of math teachers using the Internet, the current limited version of the Forum is already being used for professional development and classroom instruction, but this merely proves the concept, as was the intention of this one-year grant. (Numbers can be misleading but it is worth noting that the Forum has thousands of visitors and hundreds of thousands of files are transferred each week.) The task now is to explore the full range of relationships that support a virtual center such as this.
Many of our partners, particularly in substantive collaborations that include subcontracts, will conduct their own evaluation components and these studies will be published by the Forum and presented at various conferences. (See the subcontracts for more detail.)
Our own evaluation effort has two main foci: 1) assessment of the impact of the various projects described below on user participation, contributions, and integration of Internet activity into math education, and 2) documenting the partnerships in which the Math Forum is involved and the changes in its development in order to understand in an organizational sense what can make for success and failure in the development of a virtual math center.
Formative evaluation: In the case of the Forum, evaluation is used in program design decisions throughout the duration of the project, not just for analysis of the final results. This is why we will gather data continuously [see for example our Suggestion Box (14)]. At six-month reporting intervals all of the data gathered as part of the documentation effort (see below) will be published on the Web and used as the basis of individual focus-group discussions with each of the partners. These discussions will address the particular goals for the partnership and the specific and emergent roles of both the partner and the Forum for the next six-month period. The rapid growth and change of the Internet environment requires flexible response, and the evaluation effort is critical to this flexibility.
Dcumentation: Two lines of questioning will inform our descriptions of how the Forum works and what is accomplished:
1) What is the Forum community, and why is it successful? More specifically, what are the organizational structures, forms of interaction, and belief systems that constitute "the Forum"? Furthermore, how does the Forum make use of the formative data it collects, e.g. reorganizing priorities and staff resources, software development, new project development? Finally, what indices of change can be identified and how do these shift across the three-year term of the grant?2) How are the teacher groups and the professional organizations or partners working with the Forum, and what effects on teacher use of materials and contribution of resources to the Forum, and on student learning in these teachers' classrooms, can be identified?Methods: In order to address these questions, the evaluators will use a combination of methods: ethnography, structured interview, focus groups, and open and forced-choice questionnaires. In addition, we will be stretching the idea of ethnography, which classically involves open-ended interview and participant observation, to include: (a) tracking the 'trails' left by Forum users, and (b) analysis of change in students' participation in the Forum's interactive projects such as Ask Dr. Math and the Problem of the Week, based on indices adapted from the Standards, e.g. reflection of mathematical thinking. The students studied will be drawn from classes of teachers involved in collaborating projects and from a control group of students drawn from other classes not involved.
Additionally, teachers from the four collaborating teacher groups will be studied in more depth through classroom visits and interviews in order to investigate the ways in which the groups are working with us, as well as the impact of these collaborations on student learning and teacher involvement with the Forum. A total of 24 teachers will be studied, six from each teacher group, two at each grade level: elementary, middle, and high school. This study will permit consideration of change in teacher access, integration of the Forum into their classes, and involvement in the Forum, as well as the contribution of different types of professional support to teachers using technology in their mathematics classrooms. Furthermore, it will permit assessment of the impact of teacher access to and involvement with the Forum on student learning.
As noted above, student learning will be evaluated based on tracking student work with interactive projects. Finally, in addition to analysis at the individual level, the teacher-student groupings will be evaluated in terms of the kind and quality of the relations of the sponsoring project with the Forum.
Personnel: In addition to the current Forum evaluator, K. Ann Renninger, Associate Professor of Education, whose research interests include the assessment of change and development in student learning, we will be adding Wesley Shumar as an evaluator. Wes is an Assistant Professor of Education at Swarthmore College who will contribute research strength as an ethnographer of educational communities and organizations.
Publications: A working paper is planned on methods for using ethnography to evaluate change in virtual social networks; an electronic version will be posted on the Forum in the first year. An edited volume addressing development and transformation in the virtual community is also planned. This will enable the Forum staff and its evaluators to consider more fully indices to which they should be attending. A prospectus will be developed and a publisher and potential contributors for this volume will be contacted at the start of the project. The target date for its publication is 1999. Finally, a monograph-length volume summing up this evaluation will focus on the particular case of the Math Forum, mapping transitions in users' and institutional partners' participation in a virtual community. The target date for publication of this volume is 2000.
[Privacy Policy] [Terms of Use]
Home || The Math Library || Quick Reference || Search || Help
The Math Forum is a research and educational enterprise of the Drexel University School of Education.