Hawai'i pioneers new math teaching method

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

Hawai'i is at the forefront of research into new teaching methods that could revolutionize the way algebra is taught, using online animation, streaming video and immediate feedback designed for a generation raised on video games.

Educators say the new approach could raise the state's high school math scores, change the way high school freshmen learn advanced numbers, reduce the amount of expensive remediation in community colleges and become a marketable commodity for the rest of the world.

It might even reduce the need for math textbooks — in short supply in public schools — as Web-based "electronic textbooks" in Algebra I replace dog-eared pages.

"Math is a perennial problem nationwide in performance, so we're just trying to find a better mousetrap," said Don Bourassa, director of PCATT — the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training — which is paying for the $300,000 project that brings together three of Hawai'i institutions in search of an answer.

The University of Hawai'i's Honolulu Community College, the Department of Education and Kamehameha Schools have teamed up to apply CISCO Systems Inc. Web-based technology to subject areas in what's being called the Global Learning Network.

Hawai'i is the first place in the world CISCO is testing this new application of its technology.

The new teaching tool that emerges is intended for use both in high school and in remedial classes at the community college level.

"This is a video game generation," said HCC provost Ramsey Pedersen, whose campus is taking the lead on GLN. "The kinds of activities kids respond to are a lot of Web-enhanced activities, graphs, charts, moving things around, activities where it will tell you immediately if it's right or wrong."

"There are different types of learners," said Dallas Shiroma, coordinator for the GLN and a tech I dean at HCC. "This is trying to incorporate a lot of different learning styles and to provide materials in these different styles."

The methods were developed by CISCO to teach students their own technology, but now CISCO is making them available for subjects such as algebra, said Bourassa of PCATT, which was created three years ago by the state Legislature and is a community college consortium designed to support and pay for high-tech training.

CISCO teaches 300,000 students through these methods and has found tremendous success, said Bourassa, but there are no studies to show whether they'll be effective when applied to math.

"We'll have to run the math course with a control group in traditional math and compare the scores," Bourassa said. "Nobody has done that yet, but everyone is betting the performance is going to be better."

Bourassa said the program also will offer individualized help, with suggestions on what needs to be reviewed based on a student's answers.

"When you take an examination online, the system looks at your exam and develops a lesson plan for you based on what you don't know," said Bourassa. "It's diagnostic and interactive. They say 'This is where you need to spend more time, and here's a whole list of different activities.' It could be animation, a video, streaming video. And video gaming could be part of it. It will create content based on each individual learner."

The research is also an early foray into P-20 (preschool to college) cooperation between the DOE and the University of Hawai'i, toward the goal of looking at the state's education system as a continuum in which the whole is improved as the parts are strengthened.

"We chose math because that's the greatest area of difficulty in the world today," said HCC's Pedersen. "Lots of students in Algebra I and II are taking remediation. We run 12 to14 sections on this campus alone. If half of those people came prepared, so they didn't need remediation, we'd be saving $60,000 to $80,000 a semester. And every community college campus has remediation issues."

The new Web-based curriculum will reduce reliance on textbooks — which often are too expensive for public schools, especially when the books need to be updated every four to five years.

"The material will be stored on our server, so you don't need a text that needs to be updated," Shiroma said. "We update the files on the computer and people accessing that will have the latest version. You can look online for the material as the textbook, so you actually don't need the textbook."

Curriculum developers from DOE, HCC, Kapi'olani Community College and Kamehameha are in the midst of creating the Web-based interactive materials for the course — Shiroma calls it "an electronic textbook." Then CISCO headquarters in Phoenix will complete the design work.

Students in remedial algebra this summer at HCC will be the first to try it out.

Part of the allure for Hawai'i students will be local landmarks and references that teachers are writing into the program.

"The students would see a picture of Mauna Kea, for example, where part is above sea level and part is below, and that would be a way of introducing positive and negative numbers," said HCC mathematics professor and department chair Frank Mauz, who is on the design team.

The university system will own the Intellectual Property Rights to the new system, Pedersen said, but it will be given free to DOE schools and Kamehameha as partners in the project.

"If it's good and works and CISCO wants us to put it out there, they have 11,000 academies in 140 countries around the world," Pedersen said. "At that point we'd hope there'd be a reasonable financial return. We'll be in negotiations for that. We want to show that the kids will respond to a Web-mediated curriculum that's well-designed."

Hawai'i has 14 CISCO academies based at high schools with computer labs. Those sites and every high school with a computer lab will be able to offer this component to teachers as part of Algebra I.

The next pieces on the drawing board, Pedersen said, are Algebra II and Trigonometry.

"We're hoping PCATT will become a curriculum design house doing online design using the GLN formats," Pedersen said. "We want to be the first place in the world to offer that to any group who wants to do the same."