Research Infrastructure for the Development, Implementation, and Assessment of Mathematics Interventions at Scale: An Incubator Project

Mathematics is foundational to many topics in STEM and is often seen as a gatekeeper to advanced STEM pursuits. In order to increase the U.S.’s global competitiveness in STEM, it is crucial to support mathematics learning. Although there are promising innovations from researchers around mathematics learning, it is challenging for researchers, especially those who are junior or from less privileged institutions, to test and refine their innovations and make effective innovations broadly accessible to educators and students.

Infrastructure is needed to connect researchers and educators through low-cost, low-barrier tools. The activities of this Mid-scale Research Infrastructure Incubator project include designing and planning a “plug and play” research infrastructure that allows greater numbers of researchers to develop, test, scale, and share innovations with potential to support mathematics learning.

The infrastructure’s capabilities will be transformative for the field of mathematics education research, as more and more diverse researchers will be able to conduct studies in ways that were not previously possible without substantial overhead.

The Incubator will support planning meetings among the technology-focused non-profit Gooru, researchers from the learning sciences, mathematics education, computer science, psychological science, and a panel of administrator, educator, and teacher representatives as a steering committee. This team will develop draft protocols for protecting student privacy, vetting researcher applications, vetting study designs and materials, recruiting researchers and school participants, and structuring both the technical and human resources side of the research infrastructure.

The materials developed in this project will be shared with broader cohorts of researchers, educators, education leaders, and graduate students for feedback. These protocols will be used in submitting a Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure grant to NSF that would fully develop tools and dashboards to provide researchers with the opportunity to configure their innovations to operate in Gooru Navigator, identify and obtain consent for the use of anonymized data from Navigator users to efficiently validate their research, and request that their validated innovations be integrated into Gooru Navigator’s open platform.

The materials created as part of this incubator will contribute to researchers' understanding of topics, such as data management, privacy, and research-practice partnerships, allowing others to build upon this work in further advancement of mathematics education. The ultimate goal is that the fully developed and tested innovations from the participating researchers be applied by teachers to improve mathematics instruction and learning.

This project is supported through a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Walton Family Foundation. The award co-funded in part by the Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools.

Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.