Designing case-based hypermedia for developing understanding of children's mathematical reasoning

Abstract

Despite the growing popularity of case-based hypermedia approaches for teachers' professional development, there seems to be little agreement about such fundamental issues as the nature of a case. I examine 2 visions of what constitutes an effective hypermedia case for teachers' professional development. In 1 view, cases are episodes of classroom teaching and learning that are used to exemplify the big ideas of a domain. In the second view, cases are narratives that structure the episodes to tell stories of classroom teaching and learning. This latter view highlights the history and development of learning and the causal relations between episodes. To examine the different learning afforded by these 2 views of case I developed 2 hypermedia tools to help preservice teachers understand measurement pedagogy in elementary school classrooms. One of the hypermedia tools afforded access to episodes only. The other included the same episodes but enhanced instruction with additional narrative cases. Twelve preservice teachers studied with the episode-only tool, and 12 studied with the narrative-enhanced tool. Changes in participants' knowledge about measurement and about norms of teaching practice, and their knowledge-in-action (analysis of student work), were tracked. Access to narrative cases afforded greater opportunities for preservice teachers to orchestrate knowledge and apply it to an analysis of student work.