Cognitive complexity in mathematics teaching and learning: emerging findings in a large-scale experiment

Many Learning Sciences projects use technology to enhance the cognitive richness of teaching and learning, although few projects investigate the robustness of their approaches across a wide variety of teachers and classrooms. Our Scaling Up SimCalc project has completed experiments in which over a hundred mathematics teachers in 7th or 8th grade used either SimCalc or their existing materials. We found that students of teachers who used SimCalc learned more. In this paper, we look specifically at the issue of cognitive complexity through a case study of two teachers, contextualizing the case study within aggregate data. Aspects of the theme of cognitive complexity can be seen in (a) student performance on different types of test items (b) teachers’ report of their own daily teaching goals and (c) discourse patterns in different classrooms. Although this analysis is preliminary, it reveals the potential of understanding Learning Science-based interventions more fully by combining large-scale and case study data.