The VMC is a portal that integrates a significant video collection of students and teachers in mathematics learning settings over 20+ years with sophisticated web-based collaboration tools to test the following hypotheses:
1. The VMC will enable pre-service and in-service educators to build their confidence and skill in working with mathematics students.
2. The VMC can be a successful platform for researchers, teacher educators and practicing teachers to develop and share analyses, observations and results from mathematics interventions to improve the mathematics teaching and learning experience.
The VMC has been funded primarily through three National Science Foundation grants:
Collaborative Research: R&D: Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers' Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection on Children's Mathematical Reasoning (2013-2014), Supplemental award DRL-0822204, funded by the National Science Foundation, $198,982 ( C.A. Maher, C.E. Hmelo-Silver and M.F. Palius)
EXP: Constructing Multimedia Artifacts Using a Video Repository (2012-2015), award IIS-1217087 funded by the National Science Foundation, $549,917 (C. A. Maher, C. E. Hmelo-Silver, G. Agnew, and S. Golbeck).
Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers' Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection, (2008-2012), award DRL-0822204 funded by the National Science Foundation, $2,132,621 (with G. Agnew, C. E. Hmelo-Silver, and M. F. Palius). Collaborative research with separate grant award of $866,955 to the University of Wisconsin at Madison (S. J. Derry).
Research using the Video Mosaic Collaborative collection has explored enhancing teachers’ critical thinking and exploring children’s development through the analysis and use of videos at the site. The videos enable researchers and teachers to gain insight into the foundations of proof building and the tools and environments necessary to make connections. The videos demonstrate activities to extend and generalize combinatoric learning, as evidenced by students followed from first grade through high school in observational videos, with implications for post secondary education, through follow up interviews with selected students. Numerous dissertations, articles and presentations have resulted from research using this unique collection, including a recent book, Combinatorics and Reasoning: Representing, Justifying and Building Isomorphisms (Maher, C.A., Powell, A.B. and Uptegrove, E.B., eds. 2010)
We invite you to browse the collection, join the VMC Community and conduct your own research to contribute to understanding student reasoning, improving mathematics teaching effectiveness and analyzing child development.