Bruce McLaren has committed his career to understand how education technologies, especially digital games and smart tutoring systems, can help children learn. In Human Computing Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, McLaren develops digital learning games to study their efficiency in class and beyond.
Such a game is called Decimal point. It is a set of intermediate quality mathematics in which extraterrestrials come to earth to find out more about decimal fractions. Players must complete all mini-games in a decimal amusement park to make sure that foreigners leave the earth with a better understanding of decimals.
For more than a decade, McLaren and his colleagues brought games like this in schools in the Pittsburgh region to test their technology and their learning theories. He and his co-researchers have received several subsidies from the National Science Foundation over the years, indicating that the results have managed to advance the scientific investigation. The first results of his last NSF subsidy suggest that girls learned more from the decimal game than boys. McLaren was preparing to reproduce the study in schools in the fall with a different game of mathematics.
“The ultimate goal was to offer this plan for games that would help girls who suffer from mathematical anxiety and math difficulty,” he said.
But this will not happen now that thousands of NSF financing prices have been terminated, among them McLaren. In April, thousands of researchers learned that subsidies on which they worked in one title or another had been terminated because their projects “no longer aligned themselves” on the agency's objectives and priorities.
Crystal Kalinec-Craig, an associate professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio, learned in the space of a week that three of their projects funded by NSF subsidies had been terminated.
“Usually, if a subsidy is terminated, it is because serious misconduct has been carried out, as you use research funds or handle data,” said Kalinec-Craig. “It is (that the project) no longer aligns with the mission and the NSF vision, which does not tell you much. But then if you look at all the subsidies that have been canceled, you start to see a model.”
Targeted in the report
Many of the awards completed were included in a October 2024 report By Senator Ted Cruz, while he was a member of the classification minority of the American Senate Commerce, Science and Transport Committee. Cruz now chairs this committee. His report makes radical affirmations according to which scientists from the major parrot universities “woke up the neo-Marxist” who spoke “points of discussion on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. At least one of Kalinec-Craig's projects was mentioned in the report. The McLaren project on the extraterrestrial decimal fraction game was also listed. None of these researchers would characterize their work in this way.
“We would describe it much more based on research and human,” added Kalinec-Craig.
Since 1950, the National Science Foundation has initiated federal funding for researchers who could demonstrate that their work was fundamental for scientific progress and will make education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) more widely available. Many of these efforts have led to scientific breakthroughs, the effects of which are experienced worldwide. A large part of this success is attributable to federal funding, which has enabled researchers to obtain and study very large sets of data.
Noem Ross, executive director of the world non -profit organization Ropensci, who was Co-compilation of an online database of NSF subsidies completedFear that the general public has not yet conceptualized the importance of these endings.
“This is a wide attack on the scientific enterprise which has been so much the engine of American progress and prosperity for 80 years,” said Ross. “Motors are intended for work and middle class to participate and benefit from all that science has to offer.”
“This administration may have broken this for a generation in three months,” he added.
According to Ross, NSF's discounts for STEM education projects have overshadowed all other price endings. Of the more than 1,000 subsidies terminated, 417 were specifically linked to research on STEM education and valued at more than $ 322 million.
Real world mathematics problems
Many dismissed prices had something to do with the teaching of future teachers of elementary mathematics and college how to meet the needs of more than one type of student. This is part of an increasing trend far from heart learning, that technological progress has made redundant and towards students who develop more robust mathematical problem solving skills.
This approach is to remove abstraction by showing students how they can use mathematics to solve problems in the real world – for example, asking them to budget a grocery trip.
Kalinec-Craig's search Applies a component of mastery of mathematics which accepts that every child of children is not alike outside the class. His work shows how teachers can encourage all students to rely and share their interests and experiences with other students – in particular those who have been historically excluded from the discussions.
“There is this false presumption that it is a zero-sum game, and it is simply not true,” said Kalinec-Craig, referring to the criticisms that focusing on a group of students in a research study leaves other groups of students by observation. “I try to have these conversations with people who do not necessarily align with me politically, and they agree with a lot of things that I say. But I have the impression that we are stumbled in these fashionable words, and perhaps these people in power are armed by these fashionable words and in a way to lose the much larger image in the impact.”
The overview of the impact is that the sudden highlighting of all these subsidies will suddenly harm the educators who otherwise would have benefited from the scholarship. In many cases, studies have started because educators asked for research.
Such a project, since the end, has been led by Frances Harper, associate professor of education STEM at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His NSF subsidy involved a multi -year survey on how black and Latin families think of engaging with the mathematical education of their children. A major aspect of this research has been developed to understand the existing deficits in the way in which elementary teachers and K-12 engage with parents. He tried to address an existing dead point in training math teachers.
“Teachers are not really prepared to explain families why we could ask children to make mathematics in a way they have not learned it,” said Harper.
During his years, working on the longitudinal study funded by the federal government, Harper has collected enough evidence to conclude that many parents did not trust their own mathematical capacities.
This reports for STEM education researchers the consequences of the failure of intervention earlier. In 2023, the American Psychological Association reported This mathematical anxiety is widespread and can last well in adulthood. Researchers recognize that mathematics aversion is so strong in our culture as a certain moment, being bad in mathematics has become a shared cultural identity.
For many parents, mathematical anxiety resurfaces when their children are asking for homework help.
During the first year of the study, Harper decided to help parents fight against their discomfort with mathematics by demonstrating how they could model mathematics for their children in the real world. She recalled a recording on the ground of a session in which the parents considered how a local artist used mathematics to calculate the sizes of images and lettering to create a balanced perspective for a community wall.
“When I show the image of wall painting to teachers, they find ideas on the way they can establish links with mathematics,” said Harper. “But when they listen to the way the artist and the members of the community had to solve these problems in the moment, they just had a richer and more authentic way of connecting school mathematics to the experiences of the community.”
The loss of its funding has now created logistics challenges for Harper around sharing its results more broadly with current and budding mathematics teachers.
In the meantime, affected researchers say that Inappropriate procedures have been followed to issue termination decisions. It should be noted, they say, that they must request federal funds thanks to non-partisan methods and evaluated by peers. However, it was because they met these criteria and won their subsidies, says Kalinec-Craig, that Cruz put a target on the back.
“Yes, we fought,” Kalinec-Craig said. “But, fortunately, my parents in mathematical education, we are ready for this.”
