Designing multimedia case studies for prospective mathematics teachers.

JI. of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia (2003) 12(2), 135-161

This article describes issues related to the design and research of a multimedia case study for prospective mathematics teachers. In the design section, we discuss three questions to consider when creating a multimedia case, and explore how various other researchers have answered them. In the results section, we describe a survey-based study we conducted that focused on the use of one multimedia case that was used in seven different mathematics methods classrooms across the US. Two overall findings were (a) the most useful and most highly rated feature of the CD was the teacher reflections, and (b) overall, the multimedia case received the highest ratings from students enrolled in courses where the case exploration activities were integrally woven into the course goals.

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The use of multimedia-enhanced case studies is slowly emerging as vehicle for supporting the professional preparation of teachers. In the field of mathematics education, researchers including Lampert and Ball (1998), Barron and Goldman (1994), Doerr, McClain, and Bowers (1997), Mousley and Sullivan (1997), and Seago and Mumme (2000) have described the benefits of implementing the multimedia cases they have created. Despite these positive reports, the use of multimedia cases in mathematics education is still rather limited. One reason for this may be that such case materials have traditionally been difficult and costly to produce. For example, in her review of Lampert and Ball's book describing their videocase project, Mousley (2000) noted that the amount of resources needed to create an extensive multimedia data base is "dreamland for most readers" (p. 245). Over the past five years however, the relative low-cost and wide availability of digital video cameras, scanners, and software tools for editing video and assembling materials have made it possible to create smaller-scale multimedia case studies for reasonable amounts of time and money. This potentially enables a greater number of teacher educators to create their own case materials and ultimately helps them contribute to the growing base of materials that can be made widely available to the larger community of teacher educators.

The prospect of developing multimedia case studies for a reasonable price and in a reasonable time frame highlights the need for design criteria and some empirical research describing how these criteria can be implemented in a way that would support the professional development of prospective and practicing teachers. Our goal is to address this need by (a) describing some design issues that could inform researchers and practitioners interested in developing multimedia cases for teacher professional development, and (b) reporting the results of one research study focusing on how one such multimedia case was used by teacher educators and the prospective teachers they taught.

Case Design Issues involved in the Development of Multimedia Cases

The case design issues we describe have emerged over the course of four years as we have engaged in several iterative cycles of developmental research (Gravemeijer, Cobb, Bowers, & Whitenack, 2000) and from our analysis of other design work in the field of mathematics teacher education. Our design team (1) found that the task of conceptualizing a multimedia case study that enables prospective teachers to look at "records of practice" (Lampert & Ball, 1998) begins by considering three intertwined design decisions:

1. What are the instructional goals of the case?

2. What is the scope of the case?

3. Given the instructional goals and scope of the case, what multimedia features can be developed and what artifacts could be included to best reach these goals?

In what follows, we elaborate on these questions by first describing our design decisions and then presenting an analysis of the influence and impact of these design decisions on the use of the case called "Making Weighty Decisions" (Bowers, Doerr, Masingila, & McClain, 2000) by teacher educators at seven different sites.

Design Decision 1. What are the Instructional Goals of the Case?

An analysis of the most prominent multimedia cases for mathematics education that have been developed in the last five years revealed two different approaches for identifying the instructional goals for a project. On the one hand, the mathematical content and/or pedagogical issues can be clearly defined a priori, and then video and artifacts are collected to illustrate these points. Using this define and collect (or capture) paradigm, the developers define the types of events they want to find, and then either choose a classroom so they can prescript or prearrange a given lesson, or search databases of existing video to find ones that illustrate the desired point(s).

One example of a define and collect project is the Math*Ed*Ology professional development program developed by Bitter and colleagues at the University of Arizona (Bitter, 1999). These developers began by defining their instructional goal of creating videos that would feature elementary mathematic teachers modeling the Teaching Standards published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 1989). Once they had defined this goal, they set out to collect video and artifacts by finding teachers and segments that they felt best represented the essence of the Standards they wanted to highlight.

We can contrast the define and collect approach for developing case studies with what we call the collect and define method wherein developers begin with a general idea about the instructional goals (be they mathematical content and/or pedagogical issues), but they collect video and other classroom artifacts first, and then comb through the data collection to refine their ideas about which teaching and learning issues the data could most successfully highlight.

One example of this approach is the work of Lampert and Ball (1998), which originated with the collection of the "records of practice" of two elementary classes that were taught by the researchers. They began with a vision of collecting the artifacts of practice to create a database of information about the teaching and learning that occurred in their classrooms. Their idea was that this database could be used for investigating real practice by prospective teachers. We call this an example of the collect and define method because the issues were defined as the prospective teachers developed their own questions during their explorations of the materials.

Our approach to identifying the instructional goals of the project can also be called a collect and define approach. Before collecting the video however, we first developed some general goals and a lesson that we thought might illustrate these goals. In particular, we decided that we wanted to make a case that documented the tensions, questions, and challenges that arise in real classrooms. We then chose a classroom, developed a lesson (see Doerr & English, 2001 for an explicit description of the lesson sequence), and collected 4 days of video. After viewing the video, we then revised our general pedagogical goals into three specific instructional goals:

* to develop a case that would provide a way for teacher educators and their students to explore the complexity of the classroom;

* to enable prospective teachers to become better observers of classroom interactions; and

* to help preservice teachers learn to reflect on their own developing practice.

The third instructional goal, encouraging teacher reflection, is perhaps the most unique and, as will be later reported, the most useful aspect of the case. Although we did not know, ahead of time, all of the issues that would arise, we anticipated that listening to the case study teacher's reflections on her teaching would be of great interest to both the teacher educators and the prospective teachers. Hence, we decided to interview the teacher at the end of every lesson and before each new lesson to capture her reflections of the current day and how she planned to revise her lesson plans based on that day's discussions and student work. At the same time, since we were interested in helping prospective teachers become careful and reflective observers, we explicitly decided not to include expert commentary on the case. We felt that such expert commentary would serve to encourage prospective teachers to look to the opinions of others about the teaching, rather than encourage them to formulate their own observations and analyses. This decision appeared to be supported in practice, as none of the teacher educators who have used these cases has suggested that expert commentary be included.

Once we had developed the general ideas for our project, we collected four days of video and other artifacts in an 8th grade classroom. In reviewing the events of the lessons, we were able to define the specific pedagogical and content issues of the case more exactly. We created a preliminary CD-ROM case (Bowers, Doerr, Masingila, McClain, 1999) and examined its use by colleagues in four mathematics education classes. As a result of detailed discussions with these colleagues and analyzing the questionnaires completed by their students, we identified four themes through which one could explore the case:

* planning the lessons;

* facilitating the class flow (including both small-group and whole-class discussions);

* understanding students' thinking; and

* the mathematical content and context.

The way in which we used these themes to design the case interface and to create tools that could be used by the prospective teachers to investigate these aspects of the case will be further elaborated under the discussion of Design Decision 3.

Design Decision 2. What is the Scope of the Case?

In defining the scope of a multimedia case, one can consider two different dimensions: the length of the lessons (i.e., will the case span five minutes of instruction, 1 year, etc.?) and the focus of the issues (i.e., the specificity or generality) the case aims to highlight.

Example of a case with short lesson segments and a specific focus. The Math*Ed*Ology videocases stand as paradigmatic examples of cases that fall into the small scope category. Each case includes several short (1-3 minute) videos of actual elementary classroom instruction. The focus of these video episodes is clearly delineated in the interface and also discussed by expert commentary from mathematicians, mathematics educators, and teachers of bilingual education for students in the English as a Second Language program. The series is designed to be used in a variety of different settings ranging from individual teachers in their own classrooms to university students enrolled in methods classes.

Example of a case with a long teaching span and broad range of issues. A prime example of a multimedia project with a large scope (i.e., that spans a long time frame and addresses a broad range of issues) is the work of Lampert and Ball (1998). As noted earlier, these researchers compiled video, audio, scanned images of student work, and the teacher's journal from a full year's worth of data collected in two classrooms, a third-grade class taught by Ball and a fifth-grade class taught by Lampert. This database of their "records of practice" serves a number of different audiences all exploring different aspects of teaching. For example, preservice mathematics teachers have used the materials to explore questions involving the evolution of student thinking over time, the process of lesson development, and many other topics related to mathematical pedagogy. In addition, instructors from several other areas such as classroom management and psychology have also used the videodisks from this project with their prospective teachers to study topics such as student-student and student-teacher interaction patterns and issues of equity and access. In their research of mathematics methods students using the case materials, Lampert and Ball (1998) studied 68 investigations of the records of practice database conducted by 190 preservice elementary teachers. Their findings indicated that the quality of the preservice teachers' investigations varied widely in their formulation, focus, balance of theory and assumption, view of empirical data, and relative specificity and generality. This conclusion, which is consistent with our classification of the work as having a broad focus, led the authors to remark that the key to promoting effective case-study discussions is for teacher educators to learn to manage the interplay among the particulars of practice, the broader contexts of teaching, and more general understandings of teaching and learning.

One conclusion that we have drawn from Lampert and Ball's work is that although we can provide materials and conceptual frameworks for looking at classrooms, the preservice teachers' task of using these frameworks to integrate the tensions that teachers in real classrooms face is still very much an open challenge for teacher educators to address. This finding has greatly influenced our own work to develop a facilitator's guide that would help other methods instructors to become aware of the issues our case highlights regarding the particulars of practice and the broader view of learning as a socially-situated phenomenon.

The scope of our case. In determining the time frame that our case study would span, we considered several criteria. We chose a four day case because we wanted our audience to: (a) be able to observe the way in which mathematical content is introduced over a series of lessons, (b) study students' mathematical development over time, and (c) discuss the case teacher's ongoing reflection, decision making, and the consequences of her decisions. With regard to the breadth of teaching issues, we had decided, as noted above, to focus on a broad range of pedagogical issues including the four themes of planning the lessons, facilitating the class flow (including both small-group and whole-class discussions), understanding students' thinking; and the mathematical content and context.

Design Decision 3: Given the Goals and Scope of the Case, What Multimedia Features can be Developed and Artifacts Included to Best Reach These Goals?

Once developers have identified the instructional goals and determined the scope of their case, they must develop the multimedia tools and interface to best communicate their goals. In the case of Math*Ed*Ology, the developers created an interface that enables users to choose specific NCTM Standards being enacted. So, for example, if a user wants to see a lesson on fractions being taught in a bilingual third-grade classroom, he or she can access the desired video easily. In this way, the developers took advantage of the random access capabilities of multimedia software.

Our decisions regarding interface design were based on our knowledge of both what features have worked in the past, as well as what features did not (or what features were missing). Particular difficulties that we wanted to address were: inaudible video, the problem of figuring out the name of a child who is shown or speaking, the challenge of revisiting a segment that one might want to show later, and the challenge of seeing how specific incidents fit into the "big picture," that is, the larger scheme of the lesson sequence. To address these concerns, we devised three multimedia features: (a) a searchable transcript that would be yoked to the video, (b) a bookmark feature, and (c) an interactive timeline. By enabling users to search the yoked transcript, we figured that they could read whatever dialog was inaudible, see a child's name when he or she is speaking, find all of the occurrences of a child's name, or the first occurrence of a specific mathematical term or other desired incident. To address the difficulty of finding segments quickly, we wanted to include the capability to bookmark and annotate a specific video segment, much like one can bookmark a website using a browser. We envisioned teacher educators using the bookmark feature to mark certain segments they wanted to show their classes, and students using this feature for making presentations to the class or for themselves as notes for a topic paper. Finally, we wanted to address the big picture difficulty by including a timeline to give an idea of the relative position of the current segment within the larger progression of the lesson. The resulting interface is shown in Figure 1.

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The question of how to design an interface also includes decisions about how the artifacts and video can be best arranged to highlight the instructional issues included in the case. For example, to show how each of the four themes mentioned earlier evolved over the course of the four days, we developed an issues matrix (shown in Figure 2) and a series of study guide questions. The idea of including an issues matrix originated from our experiences working with the team that developed the "Geometry Investigations" CD (Barron, Bowers, & McClain, 1996). When using this matrix students can click on any "X" to see the bookmarked video segment. The study questions that accompany this activity involve students in critically observing and reflecting on the teaching segment and then answering questions such as "What do you think the teacher's intent was here?" or "How do you think this student was thinking about the mathematics?"

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As will be discussed in the findings section of this article, the teacher educators who used the case greatly appreciated the study questions as a basis for developing ways to use the case study with their students. The issues matrix feature served as a roadmap that could help them see what issues they might want to highlight in accordance with their own instructional goals, and the related study guide questions provided them with a base group of study questions. Another advantage of the issues matrix was that it was a good way to organize the auxiliary materials of the case and integrate them with the study questions and themes we were highlighting. Given that we wanted students to study the process of planning the lessons, we decided to include searchable copies of the teacher's actual lesson plans, and include links to these in the issues matrix. Similarly, given that we wanted to enable users to study student thinking and growth, we needed to include scanned images of student work. Our early field testing revealed that teacher educators and prospective teachers wanted to know about the background of the school, the previous topics the children had been studying, and the teacher's background. To answer these questions, we created a video overview that includes information about the school (i.e., size, general geographic area), and the class (i.e., grade, prior topics studies, type of school, type of class, etc.).

What we did not include in the case materials was information about production such as camera location decisions, and video editing decisions about how cuts were made, what constituted repetition that the editors decided to cut, when cuts were made and how much time was cut. We also chose not include artifacts that were beyond the bounds of the lesson, such as background on students' prior achievement, students' individualized educational plans, or information on the interactions with the other teachers in the school.

THE RESEARCH PROJECT

The three design questions that were discussed in the previous section can also guide efforts to evaluate a case and help designers to understand and assess the ways in which a case has been implemented by teacher educators. Thus, one can consider (a) the degree to which the instructional goals were realized in different settings, (b) the appropriateness of the scope of the case in different settings; and (c) the degree to which the multimedia features and auxiliary tools and features were used and how well each was rated.

One consistent aspect of our design and research work has been our goal to develop cases that could be used by teacher educators who were not part of the immediate development team. Thus, our research goal was to investigate how various teacher educators have viewed their own experiences using our "Making Weighty Decisions" CD in their classes. To explore these differences, we conducted a variety of qualitative and quantitative analyses. In what follows, we report on the quantitative analysis conducted on data collected during the spring of 2000. See Doerr and Masingila, 2001; Doerr, Masingila, and Tiech, 2000; Masingila and Doerr, in press; Masingila and Doerr, 2001; McClain and McGatha, 2001; and Thompson and Doerr, 2001 for detailed qualitative case studies focusing on specific instructors and specific sites.

METHODS AND DATA COLLECTION

Data Collected

Three sources of data were collected from seven sites where the case was used.

1. a questionnaire from each of the teacher educators the teacher educators;

2. transcriptions of telephone interviews with each of the instructors; and

3. a student questionnaire.

Modes of Inquiry

The data included in this report were collected from seven mathematics teacher preparation/enhancement classes taught around the country. Two of these classes consisted of inservice teachers enrolled in a master's program. The remaining five were methods classes for undergraduate and graduate students who were planning to become either elementary or secondary teachers. One of the sites was taught by the first author of this article. The goal of the interviews with the teacher educators was to probe their thinking about issues that arose before, during, and after he or she had used the CD-ROM and accompanying materials. (2)

To gain a broad pool of subjects, we posted several invitations to join our study on mathematics education listserves and responded positively to all inquiries. Out of 10 inquiries, we ended up with six instructors who agreed to participate. An instructor's full participation involved filling out a survey, asking the preservice teachers in the methods class to fill out a survey, and participating in a telephone interview with one of the project members. None of the participants received any remuneration for their participation, although they did receive complete class sets of CDs and the facilitator's guide to keep for their use. Once the data were collected, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted.

The quantitative aspect of the analysis involved computing means and frequency counts for all of the Likert Scale rating items on the teacher educator survey and on the preservice teacher surveys. We analyzed the open-ended responses by forming categories using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Using this method, a new category is formed until all of the data collected fits into one of the existing groups. In this way, our own biases, such as the four themes that comprised our instructional goals, were not considered when making the categories. After initial categories were made, the two authors discussed their viability. The first author then went back and refined the categories to make them more readable for other teacher educators interested in case design.

In what follows, we discuss the question of how to assess the "effectiveness" of the CD by looking at how it was used in different classrooms, and the degree to which our design decisions affected the ways in which the CD was used. When examining the design decisions related to the instructional goals of the materials, we explore the general questions what regarding the teacher educators using the case planned to highlight and to what degree did they felt the experience was successful.

To assess the second set of design decisions regarding our choice of scope, we asked the instructors to give a general description of how they used the CD, how many days were viewed, and the level of specificity with which their students chose to examine the issues. Finally, to evaluate the third design decision, the utility of the multimedia tools and the auxiliary materials, we asked both the instructors and the prospective teachers to rate the usefulness of each CD-ROM feature using a Likert scale.

RESULTS

Research Question 1: What were the instruction goals of the methods course instructors? What did they plan to highlight with the case, and how were their anticipated goals realized?

We asked each of the teacher educators to answer the following two survey items before they implemented the case study in their classes.

1. What do you hope to accomplish through the use of the case study? What do you hope your preservice teachers will get out of it? What concerns (if any) do you have before you begin?

2. What issues related to effective teaching and learning of mathematics do you intend to focus on? Why?

Figure 3 contains a summary of the answers to question 1 (note that most respondents gave more than one answer). As can be seen, all seven of the instructors viewed the use of the case as a way to highlight general pedagogical issues through classroom discussion and debate. Three of the seven respondents also viewed the case as providing a potential opportunity to connect the theory they had been teaching to practice. The same number also saw the case as a way to illustrate mathematical ways of thinking that middle school students display. Other issues raised by at least two of the respondents included (a) using the case as a means for examining students' mathematical thinking, (b) observing the complexity of classroom interactions, and (c) showing what reform teaching might look like. This variety of overall goals illustrates that our case, like that of Ball and Lampert's, can be seen as very broad in focus and hence used for a number of different pedagogical purposes.

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After they used the case, the teacher educators were asked to answer the following survey questions:

3. What important issues related to effective teaching and learning mathematics emerged for your students?

4. Did the case study provide an opportunity for your students to become more reflective about their practice? If so, how? If not, why not?

The data displayed in Figure 4 juxtaposes the teacher educators' lists of anticipated issues (question 2) with those that they reported as actually emerging in their classes (question 3). With regard to question 3 the issue that the largest number of instructors mentioned was "Planning and Anticipating Students' Thinking," which was not a surprise given that six of seven of them planned to highlight this issue in their discussions. However, the next few issues illustrate an interesting difference between what the teacher educators anticipated highlighting, and what they reported as issues that actually emerged. In particular, the next two most frequently discussed topics were the teacher's role in facilitating whole-class discussions and her questioning technique. Only two of the teacher educators in our survey had planned to highlight these topics and yet they arose in five of the sites. The next three topics, placing content in a real-world context, the teacher's role in small-group facilitation, and listening to students' thinking, were anticipated by three or four of the teacher educators, but were discussed in only two of the classroom sites. Finally, there were six issues that at least two teacher educators had planned to emphasize that never came up in any classroom discussions. These included issues of equity (in terms of participation and general topic appropriateness), the tension between covering the curriculum and letting students explore, and the nature of reform teaching in general.

In summary, when we compare our instructional goals with those of the teacher educators, we found a good deal of agreement, but also some areas of difference. Based on our interviews with the teacher educators, we found two explanations for the areas of agreement: (a) many of the teacher educators agreed to participate because of the issues that the case generally illustrated, and (b) those teacher educators who agreed to participate before knowing what the case highlighted often chose several topics that were described in our materials. Given our overall goal of making a case that would be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of different instructional goals, it was important to also identify the instructional goals that some teacher educators chose to highlight that we had not seen or highlighted in our materials. These included issues of equity, use of context for asking mathematical questions, and what "reform teaching" looks like.

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The complement to analyzing the degree to which our instructional goals were aligned with those of the methods instructors is to compare the propective teachers' reactions and emphases with the instructions' instructional goals. We beginby using the survey data from the prospective teachers to address the following questions:

1. What aspects of the case study exploration did the students find most valuable?

2. How do these compare with the teacher' goals?

3. As a result of investigating this case, what things (if any) and (will) the preservice teacgers do differently or pay more attention to in their student teaching and/or their own practice?

The data displayed in Figure 5 indicate that the feature the pre and inservice teachers listed most frequently as the most valuable aspect of their case exploration experiences was the teacher's reflections. Their responses included remarks such as "Being able to see the teacher talk about the lesson helped me to pay more attention to what was going on." The next two most valuable aspects, each listed by 13% of the respondents, was the opportunity to observe an entire class unobtrusively and watching a skilled teacher manage a whole-class discussion.

The data in Figure 6, which include a comparison of the distribution of the prospective and practicing teachers' views of what was important with the teacher educators' goals, indicate that there is a disparity between the issues that the teacher educators planned to highlight, and those that struck the prospective teachers. For example, 25% of the pre and inservice teachers mentioned the teacher's reflections as the most valuable aspect of their explorations, while none of the instructors had listed this as an explicit goal of the activity. In contrast, 4 of the seven instructors listed "connecting theory to practice" as one goal, whereas none of the prospective teachers saw this as an aspect of their experiences.

There are several possible explanations for the disparities described in Figures 5 and 6. In particular, due to limitations of the survey data included in this article, we are not able to determine the extent to which the students' responses referred to issues that could be considered beyond the mere management of the discussion to the deeper and more complex issues around, for example, norms for argumentation. More extensive examination of this can be found in Masingila and Doerr (in-press), Doerr and Masingila (2001), and Thompson and Doerr (2001). Two partial explanations that we can offer are based on our data from interviews with the instructors. First, it is not surprising that prospective teachers, in particular, would be concerned with the realties of managing whole-class discussions because they are well aware of the importance of class management as a precursor to effective teaching. Based on our interviews with the teacher educators, we verified the general notion that most of the preservice teachers in the study had had limited exposure to any methodologies other than traditional lecture and elicitation-response-evaluation patterns of instruction. Second, because both the prospective and practicing teachers were enrolled in classes designed to support their professional development, it seems natural that they would begin by focusing on the person who is playing the role with which they most identify, and then focus secondarily on how the teacher's actions influenced the students' learning.

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A final question we wanted to pursue was the degree to which the pre and inservice teachers became more careful and reflective observers of classroom proceedings and whether or not they applied their observations to their own emerging practice. To this end, we asked the students to describe what, if any, aspects of their current and/or future practice they might pay more attention to after exploring the case. As Figure 7 indicates, the two top concerns that most pre and inservice teachers felt they would pay more attention to were (a) listening to students' thinking, and (b) the role of the teacher in asking questions. For example, one inservice teacher wrote, "It [the case exploration] made me realize that at times I lead too much and look for agreement without looking at individual opinions. It made me want to allocate more time for students to explain their thinking."

The results shown in Figure 7 may be interpreted by taking into account the various emphases of the instructors. At the four sites where the teacher educators explicitly mentioned the importance of planning as an instructional goal for the case-study exploration, at least 50% of the students from these sites mentioned planning as one of their concerns as future teachers. For example, at a site where over 50% of all the students surveyed mentioned either the importance of planning or the importance of flexibility in reflection, one student commented: "Looking at the behind-the-scenes work has helped me to realize how much planning must go into a lesson and that I must have some ideas about how students will approach the problem." This suggests that this prospective teacher was able to observe the extent to which an experienced teacher planned for her lessons and the importance of considering the tasks in the lesson from the learners' perspective.

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When methods instructors were asked whether or not they believed that the case experience helped the students make connections to their own emerging practice, most stated that they felt that classroom discussions did enhance the students' views of effective teaching. One methods instructor stated "After the case studies, each student led a 30 minute instructional session for their peers. Many attempted to model aspects of the case study teacher's behavior during their presentations." In this instance, we see some evidence that aspects of the case study teacher's practice were beginning to be practiced by the prospective teacher.

Research Question 2: Did the scope of the case support our instructional goals? That is, was the case long enough to enable prospective teachers to become better observers of classroom interactions, and were the materials broad enough to enable the preservice teachers to learn to reflect on their own developing practice?

When assessing the scope and breadth of the case, we wanted to determine if the length of the instructional video was sufficient to involve the prospective teachers in studies of teacher planning and/or student learning beyond a single lesson or activity and whether or not the focus was broad enough to engage them in thinking deeply about a variety of pedagogical issues in teaching and learning mathematics.

One way to address the question of scope is to analyze patterns in the case study usage. Our analysis revealed that only four of the seven methods instructors assigned, viewed, and discussed the entire four day case. In the other three sites, only the first two days of the case were assigned. In the words of one instructor who assigned all four days of the case,

  When I use videotape materials, I simply show a 15-20 minute segment
  Of a lesson and have a brief discussion of the important issues
  raised.... The multimedia case provides a more complete picture of the
  planning and teaching. I used the materials over a period of seven
  days. We looked closely at issues such as planning that take place
  over time.

In contrast, another instructor stated "We only used the Sneakers problem--one and one half days. This was a good 'bite size' for a five week summer course." In short, we can conclude that the scope of the case was sufficiently flexible to accommodate a range of teacher educators' needs in that the users could view the teacher's reflections from just one lesson, or they could follow her reflections over the entire four days. Hence, we can conclude that a larger scope is acceptable if smaller-scale studies can be conducted within the larger case.

A second finding regarding CD usage was that all of the teacher educators allocated the most time to asking the prospective teachers to respond to some or all of the suggested questions we had provided in the facilitator's guide. Some instructors assigned these questions for homework, others asked their students to answer them in groups in a computer lab setting, and others used them as the basis for whole-class discussions. These results, which are consistent with other studies focusing on the use of cases in general, are critical for informing our efforts to design further projects: no matter which tools and materials are included, the inclusion of study questions is essential for supporting other teacher educators who are not familiar with the case.

A second question regarding the scope of the case is the degree to which its breadth supported a general range of pedagogical studies. Our decision to support a broad range of issues turned out to be a very good one, as evidenced by the variety of instructional goals. For example, one instructor told the interviewer that

  I think what this did for them that was different was that they were
  taking a real life classroom and analyzing the teaching. So it was a
  full context. We could look at lots of different issues within the
  classroom rather than just saying okay let's look at one issue in
  terms of problem-solving or inclusion or whatever topic we were
  talking about. So it's more what is all involved in the process of
  teaching, all in one big mix.

In short, this instructor found that the scope of our case enabled her to engage her prospective teachers in the analysis of a range of teaching issues and to address them simultaneously in the full context of a classroom.

Research Question 3: What aspects of the multimedia case study were most useful? In particular, what technological tools were most (and least) helpful? which case artifacts were rated as most (and least) useful.

To explore these questions, we examined the degree to which the multimedia tools and auxiliary materials enabled the teacher educators and their preservice teachers to explore the issues through the case study. Our approach to this question was to ask the preservice teachers and the teacher educators to rate each of the case features using a Likert Scale where 1 = not useful, 5 = most useful.

As shown in Figure 8, both the teacher educators and their students rated the classroom video highest, followed very closely by the scrolling transcript. On the one hand, we could interpret the high classroom video rating as indicating that an analog video would have sufficed. On the other hand, the high rating could also be attributed to several other factors including (a) the fact that the video is the centerpiece of the case; and (b) the fact that many of the tools were not used at some of the sites due to insufficient hardware or lack of instruction on how to use them. It is instructive to note that even at the sites were most or all of the tools were used and rated, the preservice teachers rated the scrolling transcript as second highest after the video itself.

A second interesting finding from this part of the survey was the disparity between the preservice teachers' mean rating of the searchable transcript (4.25 out of 5) and the mean rating of this same feature by the teacher educators (2.75). One reason for this may be that while many of the teacher educators were either not aware of this feature or simply did not plan to use it, some of the preservice teachers took it upon themselves to explore this tool. When talking with the teacher educators, we learned that the students may have used this feature when answering the questions that were assigned, or when preparing their presentations. While it is encouraging to learn that some students took the initiative to use the tool, we note that the searching capability was used by less than 70% of the respondents. So, although the ratings were high from those who used it, some of the students did not use the feature at all. Taken together, these findings support our design decisions that tasks and tools must be tightly integrated if designers wish teacher educators and prospective teachers to take full advantage of the multimedia capabilities offered for case exploration.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Figure 8 also indicates that the issues matrix was rated very highly by both the teacher educators and the preservice teachers. Based on interviews with the teacher educators, we believe that the matrix was particularly useful because it was tied to the case questions in such a way that the students could easily find a segment to which a question referred, and then could also review other segments featured in the issues matrix that were related to a particular incident or issue.

The three features that received the lowest ratings from the prospective teachers were the notebook, lesson plans, and seating chart. We have come to believe that the notebook, originally conceived as a tool for groups to share thoughts and progress, was not used in the way anticipated, and in fact was not needed due to the use of the bookmarks and the lack of assignments that involved taking direct text quotes from the case itself. The seating chart, although rated somewhat lower than the notebook, was used on occasion when a student needed to be identified. The reason that this feature was initially implemented was that in earlier multimedia materials (Barron & Goldman, 1994), preservice teachers reported difficulty identifying students in the case study by name. However, with the inclusion of the scrolling transcript, student names are made visible as the video progresses. Thus, when the linked transcript is available, a seating chart appears to be of limited use.

It was disappointing to learn that the bookmarking feature was only used in approximately 50% of the sites. Upon closer examination of these results and interviews, we found that, like the searchable transcript, when instruction was designed around the use of bookmarks, the feature was rated very highly (as indicated in Figure 8). For example, at one site where the teacher educator assigned her students the task of creating bookmark files for later presentation to the whole class, the mean rating for this feature at this site was 4.7 (out of a possible 5). Although we had anticipated this presentation mode of use, we had hoped that the feature would also be used by the teacher educators to make their own bookmark questions and/or compile bookmarked segments that they might want to discuss in whole-class sessions. Unfortunately, none of these uses has yet been enacted. While interviewing the teacher educators, one reason that we found for the lack of use of the bookmarks and the searchable transcript was their lack of time to prepare and incorporate the CD into their existing programmatic structures. That is, given only so much time within their semester to cover their existing agendas, the instructors indicated that the themes identified and tagged in the issues matrix and the study guide questions were sufficient tools for a first investigation of the multimedia case study.

Another reason for the low use of the advanced features was that some teacher educators were not aware that these features even existed or their potential for use within their classrooms. We improved the teacher educator component of the case by enhancing the description and placement of the features in the instructor guide. A third reason is that teacher educators who wanted to flag a certain segment but were unaware of the bookmark feature devised other ways to accomplish this goal. For example, one instructor noted that he used the page numbers that accompanied the scrolling transcript as a way to access the desired segment location. Others used the interactive timeline to accomplish this goal. Ultimately, as teacher educators become more familiar with multimedia cases in general, and our tool in particular, we can expand the utility of the bookmark files by, for example, creating libraries of bookmarks pertaining to a particular issue (such as creating a file of bookmarks that flag open-ended teacher questions) and having these libraries stored on the Internet so that other instructors can download them and add their own as well.

DISCUSSION

Since its inception, teacher educators have believed that multimedia holds great promise for providing new and effective ways to enhance the professional development of teachers. The results of this study provide evidence to support this hypothesis. As we reflect on our findings and embark on another iteration of development and research, we have begun to address new questions and form new goals. One question that many people have asked is, "how can we use your tools with our own video?" To address this question, we are currently developing a new "case development tool" that allows users to create their own cases by simply adding video and a transcript. The final product will be a self-running CD (created through Macro-Media Director) that includes a linked and searchable transcript, an issues matrix, and a page of hyperlinks (for showing case artifacts). At one site, practicing teachers who are enrolled in a master's course are using a beta version of this case development tool to design cases for undergraduate prospective teachers. Our preliminary research on their efforts indicates that although they initially felt overwhelmed and confused as they tried to think about how to define a case instructional goal and how to match this with a piece of video, they reported that the task was actually extremely thought provoking and helpful to them as prospective teacher educators. We found it particularly interesting to learn that these students were making the same capture and define versus define and capture design decisions with which we had struggled. This finding indicates that our design framework does capture the essential components of the design process and hence could be used to orient new case developers. However, the research question that this situation has illuminated is that the potential for this tool and the insights that one can gain from developing a case have only begun to be tapped.

A second question that this study raises is the degree to which teacher educators have attempted to exploit the advantages of multimedia over video. One could argue, for example, that the most highly rated feature in our survey was the video itself, and therefore the effort to develop all of the other multimedia tools was not necessary. In response, we would argue that the tools were not inadequate or less powerful than the video itself, but that their potential was not fully appreciated due to the fact that all but one of the instructors involved in the study had only used the case once, and only for a relatively short time. In fact, when the instructor who did have more experience with the case (the first author of this article) used the tool in her class, the activities and discussion were much different from classes in which the instructors assigned the video and questions without really planning ways to dig deeply into the material. This can be illustrated by considering one episode from her class. After debating various student conceptions of rate during one whole-class discussion, one prospective teacher asked whether the word "rate" was first introduced by a student or by the teacher. This was an excellent question to exploit the search capability of the transcript. Within seconds, the class found and viewed the exact segment where the teacher introduced this term, and all successive segments in which it was mentioned. Being able to find not only the wording, but also the actual film footage enabled the class to view the entire context within which this issues arose.

The rate example stands as one of many beacons that can illuminate a future mode of teacher preparation in which the prospective or practicing teachers conduct their own action research. That is, they could become fully involved in asking and pursuing questions such as "how many times did the instructor ask deep, conceptual questions as opposed to more superficial, or 'yes/no' answers?" Or "how many times did the instructor call on boys as opposed to girls?" Or, "how did the teacher react to various discipline problems?" In using multimedia tools in this way, prospective teachers can pursue personally interesting questions that will enable their teaching identities--with their own agendas, biases, and interests--to emerge.

Take-home exam                                  1%
Introduction to technology                      3%
Read Lesson Plans and overview                  4%
Concept Map / essay                             5%
Questions from Facilitator Guide--small group  10%
Questions from Facilitator Guide--whole class  11%
In-class presentations                         12%
Watching video for homework                    13%
Watching / discussing video in class           13%
Math Activity in class                         13%
Questions from Facilitator Guide--homework     15%

Figure 5. Preservice teachers' responses to the question, "What aspect
of the case exploration did you find most valuable?"

Note: Table made from pie chart.

Acknowledgements

The analysis reported in this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant No. REC-9725512. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

We would also like to thank all of the instructors who agreed to participate in this study. Their feedback was crucial to our development and research efforts. We would also like to thank Joanne Lobato for her helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

(1) This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation of the United States. Our design team consisted of the four grant Principal Investigators (Bowers, Doerr, Masingila, & McClain), three graduate students, one programmer, and one videographer.

(2) Due to the variety of students in the teacher education classes we surveyed, we will often refer to the respondents as "students" or as "preservice teachers" even though the pool did contain some inservice teachers as well.

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JANET BOWERS

San Diego State University 

USA

[e-mail] 

HELEN DOERR

Syracuse University 

USA