Education Development Center
The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project, a partnership between researchers and developers at Education Development Center, Inc. and teacher practitioners from Maine and the greater Boston area, is studying the professional learning supports middle grades teachers need to help English learners access mathematics and improve their problem-solving abilities. The research-and-development study, funded by the National Science Foundation, will design a blended-learning professional development course focused on the use of visual representations within the context of ratio and proportions, and examine the impacts of that course on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and instructional practices with English learners.  Horizon Research, Inc. serves as the external evaluator for the VAM project.