The goal of this exploratory project is to create, investigate, and provide evidence of promise for a model of online videos that embodies a more expansive vision of both the nature of the content and the pedagogical approach than is currently represented in YouTube-style lessons. This goal is pursued through the development and research of videos for two mathematics units--one focused on proportional reasoning at the middle grades level and the other focused on quadratic functions at the high school level, using an approach that could be applied to any STEM content area. The media attention on the Khan Academy and the wide array of massive open online courses has highlighted the internet phenomenon of widespread accessibility to mathematics lessons, which offer many benefits, such as student control of the pace of learning and earlier access to advanced topics than is often possible in public schools. Yet, despite the huge range of topics presented in online videos, there is surprising uniformity in the procedural emphasis of the content and in the expository mode of presentation. Moving beyond the types of videos now used, primarily recorded lectures that replicate traditional classroom experience, this project advances our understanding about how students learn from video and from watching others learn - vicarious learning - as opposed to watching an expert. This project addresses the need for an alternative approach. Rather than relying on an expository style, the videos produced for this project focus on pairs of students, highlighting their dialogue, explanations and alternative conceptions. This alternative has the potential to contribute to learning sciences and to develop a usable tool.
Despite the tremendous growth in the availability of mathematics videos online, little research has investigated student learning from them. This project develops dialogue-intensive videos in which children justify and explain their reasoning, elucidate their own comprehension of mathematical situations, and argue for and against various ideas and strategies. According to Wegerif (2007), such vicarious participation in a dialogic community may help learners take the perspective of another in a discussion, thus "expanding the spaces of learning" through digital technology. Consequently, a major contribution of this proposed work will be a set of four vicarious learning studies. Two qualitative studies investigate the particular meanings and ways of reasoning that learners appropriate from observing the dialogue of the students in the videos, as well as the learning trajectories of vicarious learners for each unit. Two quantitative studies isolate and test the effectiveness of the dialogic and the conceptual components of the model by comparing learning outcome gains for (a) conceptual dialogic versus conceptual expository conditions, and (b) dialogic conceptual versus dialogic procedural conditions. Another mark of the originality of the proposed work is the set of vicarious learning studies that contributes to the emerging literature across several dimensions, by (a) using secondary students rather than undergraduates; (b) exploring longer periods of learning, which is more conducive to deeper understanding; and (c) examining the nature of reasoning that is possible, not just the effectiveness of the approach.
