"The MIND Research Institute enables elementary and secondary students to reach their full academic and career potential through developing and deploying math instructional software and systems. A non-profit organization, MIND also conducts basic neuroscientific, mathematics, and education research to improve math education and advance scientific understanding."
It would be interesting to build a set a links to similar research results as this and discuss the implications this has for what we do as math teachers in our classrooms.
New research from Vanderbilt University has found students benefit more from being taught the concepts behind math problems rather than the exact procedures to solve the problems. The findings offer teachers new insights on how best to shape math instruction to have the greatest impact on student learning.
This just confirms what all the other research has been saying. The issue is getting all of us who didn't learn math conceptually, and who were not trained in college conceptually, to teach this way.
video of a lecture at MIT given by professor and entrepreneur James Simons, who taught math at Stony Brook, founded an investment business, and now runs the Simons Foundation which "supports basic math and physics as well as autism research."
Abstract: "This research seeks to look into the design process that promotes the development of an educational computer
game that supports teaching and learning processes. The research specifically looks at the design of an educational
computer game for teaching and learning of the topic of functions. The topic is essential in the teaching and
learning of Mathematics courses such as Discrete Mathematics, Real Analysis and Calculus among others at Jomo
Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Kenya. The computer game was developed using the
Basic Unified process (BUP) which is a streamlined version of the rational unified process (RUP). This is an object
oriented methodology mostly used for small projects with few end users. Due to the few numbers of end users we
used interview method of data collection to gather requirements for the computer game. A paper prototype was
used to validate the requirements. Use cases were used for both analysis and design of the game while Class
diagrams and activity diagrams were purely used for the design of the game. Owens' six top level design anatomy
aided in the design of the computer game. The overall computer game design was based on Crawfords' computer
game design sequence model. The well designed and developed game met all its user requirements and was able
to facilitate the teaching and learning of functions to Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science
students who were taking Discrete mathematics in their first year of study at JKUATs' Taita/Taveta campus.
Development of heuristics for measuring interest, fun and motivation are recommendations given to aid in the
evaluation of user satisfaction of educational computer games."