This project will produce videodisc based instructional materials for use in improving the preparation of elementary level teachers to teach mathematics. Video images of exemplary mathematics teaching will be coupled with analyses of lessons that examine both pedagogy and mathematical content. Videotapes of lessons will be recorded across a year's instruction in a third and a fifth grade class. The teachers in these classes will be distinguished professors of mathematics education. Their teaching will be grounded in a disciplinary perspective on mathematics and will reflect current thinking about what ought to be occurring in mathematics classes at the elementary level. They will also have a greater capacity than full-time teachers to stand back from their practice and analyze it with observers. In addition to videos of lessons, audio and written accounts of the teachers' reflections on why they did what they did and audio and written commentaries on the lessons by mathematicians, school-based collaborators, teacher educators, and educational researchers will be prepared. These will be attached to the lessons in a hypermedia computer system in order to support random and flexible access to cases and analyses from multiple perspectives. Students and instructors will also be able to construct their own analyses. It is expected that these materials will have an impact on the way teacher education is structured in the university setting. Through the project more should also be learned about the potential for new kinds of information, presented using new kinds of media, to change the way perspective teachers and teacher educators think about mathematics teaching. The cost sharing will be eleven percent of the National Science Foundation portion.
