Business as Usual or Digital Mechanisms for Change?: What Student DLOs Reveal About Doing Mathematics

Introduction

Creating, sustaining and scaling change in classroom pedagogy is a recognised and on-going challenge to learning innovation and outcomes improvement (Jesson, McNaughton & Wilson, 2015). In the subject area of mathematics, researchers and commentators continue to highlight barriers to change in mathematics teaching from prevailing attitudes and beliefs about active student participation in mathematical discourse (Boaler & Sengupta-Irving, 2016), problem solving investigation (Bailey, 2017) and collective knowledge building (Hunter, 2005, 2008). Mathematics classrooms have a long history of what Boaler (2008) terms ‘unidimensional’ character; where procedural routines dominate and the teacher is keeper and expert of knowledge (Soto, 2015). Digital learning environments (DLEs) may offer creative mechanisms for ‘disruption’ by providing opportunities for student design of conceptual digital objects and collaboration. Student-created digital learning objects (SC-DLOs) are conceived as going beyond skill-and-drill such as apps for practice and feedback because SC-DLO practices can position students as both designers and sharers of knowledge (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017). The reasons are at least two fold: (1) SC-DLOs are more than digital artefacts (or products) of the students’ learning because they involve making design-for-learning decisions (Bezemer & Kress, 2008) by the student to enhance learning for others; (2) By adopting the role of ‘instructor’, student-designers potentially deepen learning by reflecting on how best to explicate knowledge for others by combining digital modalities (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Design for learning by students is in line with developing desirable 21^st century competencies and futures (Lai & Viering, 2012).

By analysing a corpus of students’ mathematics SC-DLOs (n=155), we will argue for a qualitative difference between student-created digital learning artefacts (SC-DLAs) (e.g. worked example of an algorithm using mathematical notation) and digital learning objects (SC-DLOs) (e.g. screencast recording of a student explaining how to solve an algorithm for an online audience as a ‘rewindable’ resource). Therefore, a blogged screenshot of student Mathletics¹ progress, or photograph of groups using manipulatives to count are not considered SC-DLOs, as the artefacts represent no obvious instructional intent on the part of the designer. On the other hand, a screencast explanation of how to balance an equation is instructionally explicit in both the choice of medium (screencast demonstration) combined with verbal guidance.

Producing SC-DLOs requires access to media such as slide presentations, screencast, video, podcast and animation to afford design decisions with the full complement of multimodal resources (e.g. combinations of image, audio, writing, movement, gesture and spatial modes). Historically, DLO design by educational resource providers have been informed by taxonomies for enhancing learning potential (Churchill, 2007). Mayer’s (2014) model of twelve principles of multimedia learning has had considerable impact on the field of multimedia design for learning by emphasising: (a) visual-verbal complementarity (b) human personalisation (e.g., use of voiceover), and (c) reducing extraneous cognitive load such as minimising distraction (e.g., unnecessary animation). Students in K-12 settings are unlikely to be aware of the formal principles of design for learning in everyday subject learning, but are likely to draw on age-related experiences of digital texts when design-for-learning awareness is emphasised.