Level

Grades 1st-12th

 

Cost

Free 

 

www.videomosaic.org

 

Type of Video

Classroom lessons; after-school interventions and observations with a small group of students 

 

Length of Videos

5 minutes to 60+ minutes

 

Number of Videos

280 videos in the collections

 

Content Domains

• Elementary and Middle school: Operations and Algebraic Thinking; Numbers and Operations in Base Ten; Numbers and Operations - Fractions; Statistics and Probability; Measurement and Data; Ratio and Proportional Reasoning; Expressions and Equations

• High School: Algebra; Statistics and Probability; Functions; Geometry

 

Description of the Videos

• The following excerpts from the website’s creators give an overview of the collection:

  • “The Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC) is an interactive collaboration portal designed to enable teachers, teacher educators and researchers to analyze and utilize the real classroom videos shot over a span of 20+ years to make new discoveries in math education and transform mathematics research, teaching and learning.”

  • “The collection is unique in its selection of carefully created clips from multi-hour classroom and after school intervention and observation sessions. These clips have been selected and summarized by the researchers who led the longitudinal studies and by graduate students and research associates assisting the Video Mosaic Collaborative project. Each clip was developed to support teacher education, research and the practicing teacher needing advice and support in the mathematics classroom.” 

• The videos in the collection are in two formats: (a) the raw footage of the video format; and (b) clips of the raw footage purposefully segmented in order to represent key aspects of student(s)’ learning of and reasoning in mathematics.

• The classroom and after school classroom interventions involve high-level cognitive demand tasks. The researchers interactions with students maintain the level of cognitive demand as the students engage in the tasks.

• The videos include students using mathematical tools such as graph paper, base ten blocks, algebra blocks, computers, the tower of hanoi, calculators, and number lines.

• The focus of nearly all the videos is on students individually and collectively engaging in mathematical reasoning

 

Usefulness of the Videos

• The creators of the website write the following about affordances of the videos: 

• The teacher educator can: “Influence teacher beliefs on how students effectively learn and understand mathematics concepts” and “Illustrate how videos can enhance the preparation of mathematics educators.”

• Teachers can: “Demonstrate how students learn mathematical concepts, such as fractions; Explore effective teaching strategies for use in the classroom, with groups or one on one; Learn about topics in depth, for classroom preparation.”

• The videos capture complete segments of students’ discourse and written inscriptions as they engage in mathematical tasks in grades 1-12.  The complete nature of the segments are useful representations of students’ productive struggle as they engage in mathematical tasks.  

• Similarly, the complete segments of researchers’ interactions with students in classroom and after-school interventions are useful representations of instructional practices (i.e. posing purposeful questions, wait time, eliciting evidence of student thinking) that support the students productive struggle.

 

Ancillary Materials

• Transcripts of the videos

• Copies of student work samples

• Mathematical Tasks from the videos

• Analytic tool (coming soon) to create video excerpts and annotations.  The authors of the website describe the RUanalytic Tool as “a web based video annotation and playlist creation tool.  This tool intended to allow users to explore and analyze video in the VMC. Once the user finds video they can create an event from small parts of the video.  Users can save multiple events to an Analytic. Once saved, an Analytic can be shared with other users of the tool or with users who do not have access to the tool.”

 

• Accompanying each video is a detailed description that includes: the events of the video, researchers in the video, math tool(s) used in the video, math strand, math problem, grade level, NCTM Content and Process Standard, Forms of Reasoning, Student participants, Setting, Student Gender and Ethnicity

 

• The website has a powerful search feature that allows users to search by mathematical task, NCTM (2000) Content and Process Standard, grade level, forms of mathematical reasoning, and mathematical tool.

 

 

Author/sponsor

VMC partners: Rutgers University Libraries,  The Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning, and Wisconsin Center for Education Research. The VMC is a National Science Foundation funded initiative.