Project RITE

All but one of our teachers are in the middle of data collection right now. These middle grades mathematics teachers are gathering lesson plans, lesson reflections, samples of student work, feedback on that work, and quizzes and tests from their classroom. We’ll use this information to make characterizations of their classroom practices and to see if it is consistent with the observations we make in the coming weeks.  Lastly, we have scheduled interviews with the teachers that will begin next week.

We are excited to be a part of Project RITE for the 2007 - 2008 academic year!  To provide some context to our study, eight teachers from a local rural school district completed four online courses at UTK using both Centra® (synchronous) and Blackboard® (asynchronous) software.  These courses were designed to increase teachers’ mathematics content and pedagogical content knowledge.  Additionally, researchers on this project sought to bring about changes in teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning.  Prior research suggests that this process takes time, thus our goal here is to follow-up with these teachers a year after they completed these online courses.

To this point, we have obtained IRB approval for the Project RITE study, contacted all participating teachers, and began the logistical process of data collection within teachers’ own classrooms.  Within a few weeks, we will begin to update you on the data we have collected.