The CHEP School of Education, in partnership with two other research universities, has formed a national center designed to improve children's math skills by starting at the top.

The Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning is a collaboration involving UD, the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University and public school systems in the three states. Funded by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the center aims to increase the number of doctoral-level math educators in the United States, as well as to improve the quality of math teaching from elementary school through college.

"The primary goal is to boost the supply of national leaders in math education," says Jim Hiebert, Robert J. Barkley Professor of Education at UD and principal investigator for the project. "Nationally, many Ph.D. math educators will be retiring over the next five years, and relatively few are entering the field. We want to attract and support doctoral students in math education."

Through the project, the National Science Foundation will make fellowships--in the amount of $25,000 per year for four years--available to attract doctoral students in math education to the three universities. The fellowships, which are more generous than typical graduate assistantships, are enabling UD to recruit and support more top graduate students in math education, Hiebert says.

In addition, he says, the partnership with Maryland and Penn State allows doctoral students at the three institutions to network and share experiences. The students participate via videoconferences in joint seminars, and they also have opportunities to collaborate on research.?

The other goal of the center is to enhance the quality of classroom math instruction, and Hiebert says UD has decided to focus its part of that effort on continuing the long UD tradition of improving the undergraduate math courses taken by prospective elementary and middle school teachers. Two current Ph.D. students, Lauren Goggins and Stephen Hwang, have been studying the way UD education students learn the math concepts they will need in order to teach young children.

"We're trying to set up a good framework for the courses, so that our students can develop the skills to evaluate their students' math thinking skills," Hwang says. He adds that he and Goggins worked together with classes of undergraduates to show them what goes into solving a math problem--even a simple one--so that they can better understand how children learn.

"Our students were very enthusiastic about the class," Goggins, EG '83, AS '96M, says. "They didn't just learn the content. They learned how to see it through a teacher's eyes."

The mid-Atlantic project is the first one funded by the National Science Foundation, which plans to create additional centers in the future. Each of the three participating universities has been awarded a $2.5 million grant over five years. The target, Hiebert says, is for each school to add five new doctoral students to its program annually for the next three years.

"The goal of our Ph.D. program is to produce people who can become national leaders in math education research and in quality teacher education," he says. "You need those kinds of top leaders to be successful in any efforts to reform and improve math teaching and learning."