Athens, Ohio (August 6, 2007) – The Southeast Ohio Center for Excellence in Mathematics and Science (SEOCEMS) 3rd annual summer conference had some very special guests: the University of Rio Grande’s interim president, COE Dean Renée A. Middleton, benthic macroinvertebrates and Chef from South Park.

What kind of event could warrant such an eclectic gathering?

Nine Collaborative Study Investigation (CSI) teams from all over Appalachian Ohio came together to share their action research findings. According to Gordon Brooks, associate professor of Educational Research and Evaluation, action research is research that aims to solve a local problem or improve a local situation.

Funded by the Ohio Board of Regents, SEOCEMS awards grants to groups of public school teachers who want to investigate a problem specific to their school. SEOCEMS matches 4-6 teachers up with a university professor from one of its collaborating institutions, and a CSI team is born. The team has two years and $4,000 to research its problem, develop and institute a potential solution, and evaluate the success of that solution. In addition to the funds for materials

and resources, each team member also receives a $1,000 stipend.

CSI teams work together to develop a culture of inquiry within their departments, schools and larger communities. They ask questions and seek answers collaboratively in order to improve math and science education.

The results, as they were presented at Monday’s conference, are a testament to old- fashioned Appalachian ingenuity combined in many cases with high-tech gadgetry.

A team from Jackson High School demonstrated several games it created to determine what effect the TI-Navigator system would have on classroom questioning. TI-Navigator is a wireless system that allows students’ graphing calculators to “talk to” a teacher’s PC.

Jackson’s faculty advisor, Assistant Professor Laura Moss of OHIO’s Department of Mathematics, is known as the team’s Navigator guru. “We couldn’t do it without her; she’s invaluable!” says math teacher Debbie Mauk.

Moss and Mauk say the team’s goal is to develop a new TI-Navigator game every year. They are currently working on documentation for each existing game, which they will post on the web and share with high schools across the country. This October, they will present the games at the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference.

At the other end of the technology spectrum, Trimble High School science teacher Charles Wilson joked that he was presenting his team’s research with the technology available to him at his school – an overhead projector. But he went to Kinko’s and sprung for color transparencies, rather than settling for the school’s black- and white-only capacity. Trimble HS does have one SMART Board, but Wilson says, “it’s monopolized by the self-proclaimed ‘math geeks.’”

Wilson reports that things are improving at Trimble Local Schools. In fact, the high school met 8 of the state’s 12 indicators, which is double last year’s score. The turnaround is surely due in large part to efforts like the one undertaken by the Trimble CSI team, which found that spending extra instruction time on graphic information (e.g. charts, tables and graphs) improved students’ scores on the

graphic-intensive Ohio Graduation Test.

The Zanesville City School’s CSI team has come to the end of its 2-year cycle, but they aren’t finished investigating how the use of SMART Boards and other new technologies improve student learning. While their results have been mixed, there is one gadget that has definitely increased student motivation and enthusiasm: the clickers. The “clickers” are TurningPoint keypads. The team used grant funds to purchase a set of 32. Every child in the classroom gets one to answer multiple choice and True/False questions. Their answers are anonymous to each other, but the teacher knows which students might benefit from additional explanation or a different teaching tactic.

Zanesville High School math teacher Teresa Zachariah says the most beneficial part of the CSI team model is the mentoring and collaboration. “It pulls teachers out of their closets and brings them together so they know what’s out there. I wouldn’t even have known that the technology I’m using now was out there if Mrs. Garner hadn’t pulled me into this program,” Zachariah explains, nodding to Margaret Garner. After years as a Zanesville High math teacher, Garner is retired, but she serves as a mathematics education consultant for the Muskingum Valley Educational Service Center.

The Beaver Local High School team traveled the greatest distance to attend the conference. They came all the way from Columbiana County, the northeastern-most county of Appalachian Ohio, and these four math and science teachers brought the best pictures.

Project coordinator Jodi Haylett devised a field research experiment for her high school science students. They used the kick seine method to assess the stream quality of all three branches of Little Beaver Creek and then identified the macroinvertebrates they captured.

Haylett’s teammate, math teacher David Andres, had his statistics class develop and execute a research plan for evaluating the science students’ learning. The budding statisticians used questionnaires, open interviews, on-site observation and even videotaping to determine whether Haylett’s lesson plan was effective. They also analyzed their peers’ scores on Haylett’s midterm and final exams to prove conclusively that high-quality field research makes for excellent science education.

And excellence is exactly what the Southeast Ohio Center for Excellence in Mathematics and Science is working to achieve.

By Amy Robison

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