The Public Learning Media Laboratory designs and produces web-based cognitive support toolsets that target critical Middle School math, science and information literacy skills.

A Focus on Support

Cognitive supports are technologies that empower learners to robustly learn skills and concepts. Supports provide a scaffold for learning process skills in a high-support environment, and then fade as the learner becomes more able to apply skills on their own.

A toolset is the combination of a process tool (that teaches necessary school skills such as how to search or how to multiply) with tools that lead to deeper understanding about components of the targeted process skill.

For instance, our Multiplication tool will teach the Standard, Lattice and Partial Products processes for solving multiplication problems, and be supported by sub-tool, for instance, that teach commutativity. Toolsets are true scaffolds that are intended to become unnecessary as a learner moves beyond the tool itself. The final tool is the learners' robust understanding of the skill. 

An exploration of skill development

Throughout 2010, we will be developing our Math education agenda. The agenda is an ambitious merger of the current understanding about children's math skill learning and learning progression, the multitude of algorithms that exist for math instruction, and information about common math weaknesses.

Importantly, the agenda is intended to guide our production effort toward the most critical math aspects of Arithmetic and Algebraic math learning.