Pinterest Curation and Student Achievement: The Impacts of Mathematics Resources on Students' Learning Over Time

• In Event: Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: Social Media in Education

Abstract

Objective. As of this writing, the coronavirus has forced teachers in elementary schools nationwide to grapple with a new world of online schooling, shifting engagement in both workplace and school from face to face to online with emergent expediency. As professionals responsible for the work in a fundamental social institution, teachers use social media just as do other members of society (Opfer, Kaufman, & Thompson, 2016). Little is known regarding the resources teachers acquire and share online, how they permeate the classroom, and their relationship to students’ learning. The knowledge and practices acquired from virtual resource pools, those spaces in which teachers may access a large array of instructional resources, may be observed in classroom teaching and planning (Authors, 2018a).

Perspectives. This work advances the state of the field by pairing new forms of educational data within social media (e.g., Pinterest) to administrative state educational data. Using interdisciplinary methods to access and interpret information within social media, it connects human behavior at broad scale and in real time to summative assessments of student learning. This will allow an examination of the relationships between teachers’ instructional planning, mathematics instruction, and their students’ academic growth over time.

Methods. Merging big data from Pinterest and administrative data from the Indiana Department of Education on 10,383 fourth through sixth grade students across 2010-2017, this study employed three-level hierarchical linear models to identify relationships between curation and students’ achievement. Using the revised Blooms Taxonomy, we analyze the cognitive rigorous inherent in instructional problems within mathematics ( Anderson & Krawthwol, 2001; Bloom, 1956). This paper provides a first look into the connections between individuals’ virtual and face to face interactions and the mutual dependency they hold.

Results. Our results indicate that when estimating students’ growth across years, teachers’ curation of instructional tasks, requiring students to use skills including understanding and applying knowledge, relate to increases in learning. This stands in contrast to teachers curating resources requiring students to remember or memorize facts, in which learning decreased over time. In other words, resources focused on the base functions of recall, memorization, retelling, and understanding are less related to growth in student learning as reflected by state assessments. However, what this does not say is what state assessments are meant to capture, do capture, and how this may vary according to student and teachers’ local context.

Significance. Teaching and education literature show that planning and enactment are interrelated to student learning (Hennessey, 2018). We find that in turn, teachers’ curation is related to students’ learning. What is unknown is how resources curated interact with district curriculum, or may create an added depth of complexity to instruction, collegial collaboration, or planning. As teachers’ rise to address the challenge of teaching online across subjects, there could be a press for resources that can be assembled efficiently. Through communication with educational leaders and elementary administrators we may impress an understanding of how to evaluate tasks’ inherent cognitive demand and the effect on young learners.

Authors

• Kaitlin T. Torphy Knake, Michigan State University

• Zixi Chen, Michigan State University

• Xiuqi Yang

• Jordan Tait, Michigan State University