This project has been funded by the University of Melbourne and is being conducted by a team including the authors with assistance from Gary Asp, Nick Scott and Amanda Penrose. Understanding decimal notation is a surprisingly difficult task. Research around the world over many years, as well as research in our department, shows that a full understanding is achieved by only two thirds of students of school-leaving age in many countries. Since the modern world relies upon the metric system and decimal notation in so many ways, this is an important problem for mathematics educators to address.
Multimedia presents new opportunities for teacher education.
With financial and staffing constraints reducing both the contact of lecturers with students and the amount of time spent by students on supervised teaching practice, there are real benefits to be derived from being able to study children's thinking through multimedia resources. Short movies of children working on problems, derived from our research projects, can be shown in lectures and are then available for analysis and detailed study by students at other times. The case studies are presented in a range of ways including children's responses to a quiz with a text explanation of why a certain answer was chosen. The case studies both illustrate common misconceptions and give the user practise in observing both written and verbal clues about children's thinking about decimals. Research associated with the use of multimedia is developing around several themes.