Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2021 - 6

Critical Consumption of Online Resources
Emily Shapiro, Lara K. Dick, & Amanda Sawyer

In our current digital age, teachers often find educational
resources online, and Teachers Pay Teachers is one of
the most popular websites. According to Teachers Pay
Teachers (TpT) more than two-thirds of U.S. teachers use
TpT resources in their classrooms; there are 3 million
resources available on TpT which have been downloaded
over 1 billion times (Teachers Pay Teachers, 2020).
Despite the growing popularity of websites such as TpT,
there are few publications in the mathematics education
community examining resources found on these websites.
In this article, we share information pertaining to teachers'
online searches for math activities and the quality of
these activities. We then discuss how our team has used
this information with teachers both in and outside of
classrooms to curate and adapt activities found online.
While the focus of this paper was a study of elementary
mathematics activities, this study has direct implications
for K-12 mathematics teachers.
Study Background
In June 2018, we conducted a survey to determine where
and how teachers search online for elementary math
activities. The survey was sent to the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and Association of
Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) state affiliates
who were asked to forward it to their members. In
addition, the survey link was posted on multiple forms
of social media, including Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter using hashtags such as #elemmathchat, #edchat,
#mathchat, #elemchat and #numbersenseroutines. In the
survey, we asked teachers about their online searching
practices including how often they searched online and
what websites they frequent to download mathematics
resources. In addition, we asked the teacher participants
to upload and discuss a math activity that they found
online and used in their classroom. We received over 600
responses from K-6 teachers across 48 states.

" We coded the top 500 free

elementary math activities on both
websites for their level of cognitive
demand using Smith and Stein's 1998
Task Analysis Guide (TAG), which
outlines four levels of cognitive
demand: Memorization, Procedures
Without Connections, Procedures
with Connections, and Doing
Mathematics.

"

6

| Spring/Summer 2021

More than 99% of the teachers surveyed reported using
the internet to search for elementary math resources. Most
teachers indicated searching for mathematics resources
online weekly across all years of teaching experience.
When we asked what websites they used, teachers
indicated using websites like TeachersPayTeachers.com
(89%) and Pinterest.com (74%) most often. We refer to
those websites as unsanctioned because anyone can post
resources to share. Other less popular websites included
NCTM.org (34%) and Education.com (25%); we refer
to those websites as sanctioned because activities must
undergo some sort of review system prior to being posted.
Detailed results of the survey can be found at Shapiro,
Sawyer, Dick, and Wismer (2019).
Investigating the Level of Cognitive Demand of Top
Free TpT and Pinterest Activities
Because the teachers surveyed indicated using Pinterest
and TpT more often than other websites, we investigated
the quality of their elementary mathematics activities.
We coded the top 500 free elementary math activities on
both websites for their level of cognitive demand using
Smith and Stein's 1998 Task Analysis Guide (TAG), which
outlines four levels of cognitive demand: Memorization,
Procedures Without Connections, Procedures with
Connections, and Doing Mathematics. These four levels
of cognitive demand are described in Table 1. Also
included in Table 1 are sample activities we coded with
their respective levels of cognitive demand. For coding
the levels, the research team worked together to reach
inter-rater reliability using Fleiss Kappa (Fleiss, Cohen, &
Everitt, 1969). For more details about this analysis, please
refer to Sawyer et al. (2019) and Dick et al. (2019).

Texas Mathematics Teacher
https://TeachersPayTeachers.com/ https://Pinterest.com/ https://Education.com/ https://NCTM.org/
Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2021
