Researchers Nigel Bosch, Michelle Perry, and Meg Bates (l-r).

Mathematics has long been the least favorite subject for K-6 teachers to teach. Three University of Illinois researchers are working to help teachers become less anxious about—and more adept at—teaching math.

Imagine you’re a fourth-grade teacher. You love teaching reading, language arts, social studies, and science.

But when it comes to teaching math—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, solving multi-step word problems—well, not so much.

You’re not alone.

“Elementary teachers tend to feel most comfortable with language arts, with writing and reading, and most uncomfortable with math,” says Meg Bates.

Math anxiety, Michelle Perry says, is real. “Research shows that elementary teachers’ math anxiety spreads to their students and has long-term negative consequences,” she notes.

Perry, an Educational Psychology professor in the College of Education, is principal investigator (PI) in a three-year study that examines PreK-6 mathematics teachers’ behaviors with an online professional learning platform.

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, centers on the Everyday Mathematics Virtual Learning Community (VLC) website, which was begun in 2009 and launched publicly in 2011. Bates, co-PI for the study and director of the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC), was the driving force behind the website’s creation. IWERC is a part of the University of Illinois system, housed under the Discovery Partners Institute.

The VLC brings together teachers and resources to create a supportive community for PreK-6 math educators. It has more than 65,000 members across the globe, nearly 500 videos, and over 900 documents to help teachers improve their math teaching.

Need for Professional Learning Opportunities

“There’s a growing need for professional learning opportunities for elementary mathematics teachers,” Perry says. “Online resources can provide essential support, especially for teachers from low-resourced schools, in which there is often limited funding for professional development. We wanted to provide a space that could offer ongoing professional learning for teachers, a space that could offer more than what teachers get in one-time workshops, which are important but are a very different type of professional learning.”

The project will explore different ways that teachers participate in online learning in a platform that includes videos, discussions, and other resources for teaching math.

“We’ll look at how different profiles of participation influence teachers’ learning,” Perry says, “and examine how to design different types of learning experiences within the platform. Given the current reliance on online resources, it is crucial to know how teachers perceive what they learn when their learning is self-directed and self-paced.”

The project is important, Perry adds, “because teachers have very limited time to engage in professional learning. A website that is devoted to helping teachers improve their teaching of elementary math and that is accessible twenty-four seven for free is a great resource.”

Series of Studies

This current study is the third in a series of related studies. Bates has been involved in all three, Perry in the latter two, and Nigel Bosch, co-PI and assistant professor in Educational Psychology and the School of Information Sciences, came on board for this study.

“My focus is on using data science and machine learning methods to try to uncover what the different types of teachers are who visit the website and what their goals are and their patterns of behavior are,” says Bosch. “In the first few months of data we’ve collected, two thousand eight-five teachers have been active.”

Bates says the project, which began when she was at the University of Chicago, has evolved over the three grants that have funded it.

“When we started this in 2009, there wasn’t anything like this,” she says. “There were some rudimentary discussion boards…. We had to build features as we went.” As the internet and social media advanced, they added more aspects, such as regular nudges and reminders to engage that teachers could opt into.

“Then, when Michelle’s team came on board for the second grant, we went from thinking about how we can get teachers to learn from the website to looking at how videos and artifacts could change how teachers learned from them,” Bates says. “I see this current study as a continuation of that. We understand that teachers are distinct individuals who come to the site for different purposes and patterns of use, and that the learning has to be tailored to that.”

Wealth of Resources

The idea, Bosch says, is to target individualized modifications to the website and add interventions or nudges that are suitable for a particular type of user with a particular type of goal. “For example,” he says, “some teachers are there for professional development, while others are there for community, while still others might want to learn about a particular curriculum.”

The VLC site offers professional development credit for teachers who go through its structured courses. It also offers, as Bosch alluded to, material that is subject- and curriculum-specific and opportunities for teachers to interact with and learn from each other.

“Another key piece is the site is rooted in artifacts of practice, such as watching videos of other teachers teaching,” Bates says. “The site was really built around getting teachers to collaborate and engage with these artifacts of practice. So, the resources page has lesson videos, student work samples, instructional tools, things that teachers have shared that they created to teach math. We wanted to build a robust conversation around those artifacts. And there’s also a separate collaborative space where teachers can just talk about anything.”

The connection across the three grants, Perry says, “is looking at teacher learning online and how we can improve their teaching of elementary math. While this study is more focused on the ways in which learners navigate through the website, there’s a very synergistic building from one study to the next.”

Project Phases

The early phases of the current project will use web analytics, measures of math anxiety, surveys, and interviews to develop profiles and understand how teachers perceive their learning. The final phase will add assessments of teacher learning to test the design of interventions grounded in the analysis from the early phases.

“Each phase is essentially one year of the project,” Perry says. “Right now, we’re looking at different cluster solutions, meaning how can we group teachers together based on similar behaviors. We’re finding out some things about how teachers are using the resources and what prompts them to go to the website.”

That understanding, she adds, will help the team to change aspects of the website to optimize teacher learning.

Model Site for Other Subjects

As for the future of the project, Perry says “We believe that you can always improve. We can always make things better. The technology will change, teachers’ needs will change. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and be responsive to the needs of teachers and students so that we can improve learning mathematics for our nation’s children.”

Bates agrees, saying she thinks the project will live on in some form for a long time if they do it right.

“These three grants have been about making the VLC a best-in-class model for teacher learning,” she says. “My hope is that it becomes more of a regular experience across K-12 and that people can learn from us and use this model for teachers in different subjects.

“I would love to see this more adopted as a way that teachers interact with their own learning.”