By: Brittany Chenelle

ATHENS, GA – Ever wonder what makes mathematics difficult for some students to learn? Two UGA College of Education researchers are determined to find out.

Mathematics education professors AnnaMarie Conner and Jessica Bishop have received two CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation.
The awards total over 1.2 million dollars to fund the collections for the studies.

“The money will actually be used to fund the data collection and analysis of video data for four years of data collection,” professor AnnaMarie Conner said.

The video data will be filmed on campus during math education students courses, student teaching, and the first two years of teaching after graduation.

”It helps us to know how what we’re doing makes an impact on our students,” professor Conner said. “That’s important because we always want to know well what can we do to help our students better teachers.”

Students like Pierre Sutherland are also excited about the grant.

“For me as a student, its nice just to be apart of it,” Sutherland said. “It’s nice to be able to get involved with some of these projects and see how these people go about obtaining their grants.”

The Math Education department plans on making incremental changes as the study progresses and take what they learn to revise courses.