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White
papers and research
MMAP environments are particularly strong in giving students
opportunities to deal with complex problems that require multiple
strategies and skills to solve. In a design environment, students
must construct the problem for themselves, state it in mathematical
terms, and use tools to plan and analyze a solution. Research
results point to this feature of MMAP as a major strength
of the program:
• Technology
in the Mathematics Classroom: Guidelines from the Field
By Shelley Goldman (2001). The project directors of all
seven of the educational technology programs that were designated
as exemplary or promising by the U.S. Department of Education’s
Educational Technology Expert Panel have written articles
for this special issue of ERIC/IT
Update.
•
Bushey (1997) completed an analysis of a San Francisco classroom
where the Dream Home unit was being field-tested. She compared
the same students working in MMAP (a “problem emergent”
curriculum) and working on similar measurement problems preconstructed
on a measurement worksheet from a textbook. She showed that
in the preconstructed task students had no idea they were
wrong in their work until they were told by the teacher, while
in the MMAP units they defined, grappled with, and solved
many problems with the help of feedback from the context.
• Similarly, Cole (1995b) showed how students working
on a design in the MMAP unit, The Antarctica Project, developed
the ability to analyze their designs for inconsistencies in
scale and measurement, and made progressively more sophisticated
adaptations of their designs to meet the constraints of the
task as given and new constraints that developed as the whole
class critiqued one another’s designs.
• A study by Cole (1995a) indicated that the computer-use
in MMAP did not correlate with inequitable patterns of participation.
• Berg and Goldman’s study (1996) analyzed the effectiveness
of MMAP’s design-oriented approach in engaging students.
They found that a sense of ownership, opportunities to use
individual expertise, and a final product that seemed real
to students were important factors in engaging students in
mathematics learning through design activities.
• A paper by Goldman and Knudsen presented to ICLS, documented
some of the issues around development of the Pathways project.
Download it here.
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