Video Mosaic Collaborative captures two decades of math learning experiences across New Jersey

A wealth of education research that for years had been available only on videotapes at Rutgers will soon be accessible online to researchers worldwide.  

The Video Mosaic Collaborative, a partnership between Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will display the work of Rutgers researchers who, for more than two decades, videotaped  math classes in K-12 schools across New Jersey.  

The videos, owned by Rutgers’ Robert B. Davis Institute of Learning, part of the Graduate School of Education, captures a generation of classroom learning experiences and could break new ground in math education because they track students from elementary through high school. The footage contains classroom as well as after-class learning that cover fundamental math concepts.  

“The collection contains unique and valuable video data, as well as digital copies of students’ work, that show how students build mathematical ideas and develop ways of reasoning over time, in a variety of diverse school settings, across all grade levels, and in several math content domains,” says Carolyn Maher, a professor in the GSE, and one of the principal researchers who amassed the data.  

Rutgers University Libraries, in partnership with the Davis institute and UW-Madison, is creating a sophisticated website that will incorporate 400 hours of research on mathematics (from a larger collection of 4,500 hours of video).  In addition, the project adds identifying labels (or metadata) about each video. With the metadata, any online visitor can look for videos that meet their research needs. Topic searches can be broken down by the type of math content, grade level, teaching method, researcher, school district, year of study, and other forms of classification. 

The project will also allow users to add their own notes, create and store clips from each video, and analyze the video in comparison with others in the collection. Once the site is fully developed and launched, it will enable other scholars to add their own videos and contribute to the body of research.  

More than 28 doctoral dissertations have already been written, and seven more are in process, based on the videotape collection. The website project, which is expected to be up and running by the end of summer, 2010, is supported by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.  

The Video Mosaic Collaborative website is built upon RUcore, the Rutgers Community Repository, a broad web-based system that preserves and makes available the research of Rutgers faculty members.  

For more information on the Video Mosaic Collaborative, contact Maher at carolyn.maher@gse.rutgers.edu or Agnew, project director in the Rutgers University Libraries, at gagnew@rci.rutgers.edu. The Video Mosaic Collaborative website can be viewed at  http://www.video-mosaic.org.                                                                                

– Harry Glazer