Meeting the Needs of Diverse Student Populations: Findings from the Scaling Up SimCalc Project

Citation

Vahey, P., Lara-Meloy, T., Knudsen, J. (2009). Meeting the needs of diverse student populations: Findings from the Scaling Up SimCalc project. In Swars, S. L., Stinson, D. W., & Lemons-Smith, S. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University. pp. 416-424.

Abstract

While research has shown the effectiveness of representational technologies in mathematics education, barriers to broad use remain. The Scaling Up SimCalc project has begun to address these barriers by considering the role of technology within a wider “curricular activity system.”
In this paper we discuss how we leveraged the representational and communicative infrastructure of SimCalc to meet the needs of a diverse student population, while we also met the needs of key stakeholders in the wider education system. This resulted in increased learning for a diverse group of students. We also discuss possible improvements to our intervention.


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