What Is a Multimedia Experience?

• In Event: 66.072 - Multimedia Online Experiences as Research Tools to Study Mathematics Teaching Knowledge at Scale

Abstract

This paper explicates what we can mean by a multimedia experience by going back to the genre of the research questionnaire informed by current notions of multimodality. The questionnaire is a canonical tool of social research that uses language, written or oral, to elicit and collect data—with interviews and surveys being particular cases of the questionnaire. Multimodality (Kress, 2009) suggests that both prompts and responses could rely on various modes of communication (gestures, facial expressions, body position and movement, etc.); digital tools (screens, keystrokes, special peripherals) could mediate such multimodality in a questionnaire. Thus multimedia experiences can realize multimodal questionnaires, which can be used to inquire about practice, particularly teaching practice, even when respondents don’t have a language for practice, which is exactly the case with teaching where so much teaching knowledge is tacit (Grossman & McDonald, 2008; Sternberg & Horvath, 1995): With an appropriate technological mediation, respondents can be situated in mathematics teaching contexts and their responses to those contexts could be recorded. Multimedia experiences thus bring multimodality to the research genre called “situational judgment test” (Weekley & Jones, 1999) which has been used to research professional or practical knowledge. Multimedia experiences can help our field navigate the gap between explicit individual knowledge and, the more general and pervasive, tacit knowledge which is embedded in practice (Cook & Brown, 1999).

Our paper is conceptual and elaborates on how tacit teaching knowledge embedded in practice can be elicited in the context of multimedia experiences. We present an ontology (Guarino et al, 2009) of multimedia experiences that includes simulations, decision problems, breaching experiments, depiction, tagging, or description exercises, rating and ranking exercises, and rehearsals, among others. Our examples, drawn from our and others’ usage, flesh out what can be meant by multimodal questionnaire. The examples also articulate a number of variables that are to be considered in the process of research instrumentation: Variables used to present a context for the deployment of teaching knowledge (including the many considerations needed to represent mathematics instruction and to devolve responsibility for the respondent) and variables used to elicit and capture the respondent’s input. These considerations render the collection of records of practice (as in video surveys like TIMSS) as one among many instrumentations, where the prompt is tantamount to the request to observe practice and the respondent’s input is mediated by videorecording and transcription protocols. All kinds of multimodal questionnaires need to negotiate sampling and coding challenges at various levels.

One particular set of challenges presented by multimedia experiences has to do with the representations of mathematics embedded in representations of practice. When a teacher is ushered into a simulation of mathematics instruction, where, say, they have to respond to students’ mathematical work, the latter has to be represented in some way. Students’ language, gesture, inscriptions, or computer actions need to be accommodated into the simulation, hence they also need to be mediated. Our paper brings those considerations together into an articulation of the variables and questions that can be asked about mathematics teaching knowledge using multimodal questionnaires.

Authors

• Patricio G. Herbst, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Daniel I. Chazan, University of Maryland

• Amanda Marie Milewski, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor