Investigating Interactive Technologies in Elementary Mathematics

Auburn, Maine

Reflecting on her work with Interactive STEM and the Research + Practice Collaboratory, an elementary school teacher in Auburn, Maine, says: “For a small district with only six elementary schools, there has been a huge increase in knowledge about early mathematics learning. A significant number of teachers now understand early-learning progressions, math discourse, and problem solving to a higher level with little children, which is not always what early elementary tends to focus on.”

Before the research-practice partnership began, the Auburn School Department had employed a number of improvement efforts to address low mathematics achievement in its K–3 classrooms, including one-to-one mobile tablets to help tackle achievement gaps among subgroups within and across elementary schools. Auburn’s educators and school leaders, Maine university researchers, and the Education Development Center (EDC) focused on Interactive STEM created a clearer vision of effective practice for the learning and teaching of mathematics in the already technology-rich K–3 classrooms. Additional collaborative inquiries surfaced a need to explore critical and enduring mathematics practices and key content topics such as numerical fluency and proficiency in number and operations.

Today, perceptions about research and practice in Auburn are shifting, and expectations about what learners and collaborators at all levels can accomplish together have expanded. While teachers have been surprised by young students’ abilities to talk about mathematics in sophisticated ways, mathematics researchers have learned how to better facilitate collaborative research in the context of the classroom. The data that have been collected, the artifacts that students have created, and the relationships that have formed are the result of the mutually beneficial partnership between Auburn educators, Maine researchers, and the EDC team.

Read the case study here.

Explore resources related to the effective integration of technology in math learning.

Watch videos of classroom learning from the Interactive STEM project.