In the past, educators and policy makers believed that by providing more resources they could directly improve student-learning outcomes. To their frustration, this turns out not to be entirely true. Resources may be necessary but they are not sufficient. Resources themselves are not self-enacting, that is, they do not make change inevitable. Differences in their effects depend on differences in their use. This is also true in the case of educational technologies. As developers of these technologies we need to understand how resources fit within the classroom environment as enacted and how they can be effectively used to increase student learning. I report on four case studies conducted within the context of the Scaling-Up SimCalc study. In the study, "treatment" teachers were given a set of new resources to use: a combination of curriculum, educational software, and teacher professional development. "Delayed treatment" (control) teachers were asked to use their usual curriculum. Year-one study results demonstrated by randomized controlled testing the successful use of technology in class settings; however, there was little information on how the students and teachers actually interacted with the resources. Case study classrooms were selected to examine the effects of variation of computational resource arrangements: one utilized a computer lab, two used mobile laptop carts, and one used a laptop connected to a projector. The first round coding and analysis shows that the observed classrooms varied not only in their classroom set-ups but also in how teachers and students interacted with the software, the workbooks, and with one another. The variety of resource interaction points to the robustness of the SimCalc project: students and teachers can interact with the SimCalc resources in a variety of ways and still achieve student-learning gains. However, through subsequent review and analysis of the observation data five themes emerged. These themes suggest commonalities in classrooms practices surrounding the use of resources. Two new theoretical constructs, "socio-physical resource richness" and "resource use withitness" help describe (1) physical and social arrangements of resources and (2) how teachers and students manage resource use. / Ph. D.

MathWorlds is a piece of educational software that allows students to explore a variety of topics related to the mathematics of change and proportionality, utilizing dynamic graphs and animated "worlds". SimCalc is the package of MathWorlds software plus curriculum and teacher professional development, and has a history of significant success in single classroom studies. According to Simonsen and Kensing (1998), "users will not change the way they work to adapt to a computer system if the benefits are not significant and obvious." While researchers know SimCalc has a significant impact on student outcomes, is this obvious to the teachers? One powerful source of information about this question is the corpus of extensive phone interviews that my colleagues and I conducted with teachers after they completed the SimCalc curriculum. Many of our teachers recognized SimCalc as something that could be beneficial for their students. Besides raising test scores, teachers using SimCalc introduce more complex mathematical ideas to their students, which have ordinarily been considered outside a normal 7th grade math lesson. This was reflected in the phone interviews when treatment teachers mentioned more complex mathematical ideas than the control teachers. However, some treatment teachers struggled with using SimCalc because it was so different from their current teaching methods. In this case, SimCalc was not compatible with their current teaching methods. Also, for some teachers, using technology such as MathWorlds is a complex process with many hurdles to overcome. Future research must investigate ways to bridge the gaps in teaching methods and encourage more support for teachers using technology. By doing this researchers can make SimCalc more compatible for teachers with different teaching methods and reduce the number of obstacles teachers face when using technology in the classroom. With continued effort, research and support, we can look forward to the diffusion of more educational innovations such as SimCalc. / Master of Science