National Science Foundation (NSDL Award #1044427)

MSP2 Site: Middle School Portal 2, Math & Science Pathways

Evaluator: Carole Beal Professor School of Information: Science, Technology and Arts University of Arizona.
Advisor: Kim Lightle, School of Teaching and Learning College of Education and Human Ecology, Ohio State University

Graduate Students: Sen Cai, Siddharth Jain

The goal of the proposed project is to develop intelligent resource management and collaboration tools that greatly increase use of NSDL resources by math and science teachers within MSP2. Our proposed work will build on a couple of prior NSF projects on automatic document classification, forum participant profiling, and connecting help seekers to peer mentors within online forums. We will first classify NSDL resources for middle school math and science with respect to categories of teacher activities and interests (such as student evaluation, preparing course materials, looking for technology tools, organizing events, etc.) as well as curriculum topics. The resources will include information that is accumulated within the social networking site, such as messages posted by the teachers, as well as other existing NSDL resources. Our add-on tool will process the content posted by individual teachers according to their activities and interests, and recommend use of matching NSDL resources. When more than one teachers is interested in the same topic or similar activities, the system will promote collaboration by sending a note to potential mentors or collaborators. User feedback or votes on system recommendations will be used for evaluation and tuning of the recommendations. We will also analyze how and when NSDL resources help teachers through both message content analysis and voting.

The intellectual merit of the project is represented in the development of innovative technologies for automatic NSDL resource recommendation, and assessment of NSDL resource usages and how the resources help teacher activities. The results of the project will have broad social impact by enhancing access and use of NSDL resources in nationwide teacher networking site. This research has the potential to transform middle school teaching practices by providing instructors with easier access of NSDL resources and more help from their peers.