NSF invests $7.5M across 5 projects to enhance K-12 mathematics learning
The U.S. National Science Foundation Collaboratory to Advance Mathematics Education and Learning (CAMEL) for K-12 program, alongside philanthropic partners including the Walton Family Foundation, is investing $7.5 million across eight new awards. These awards support five projects that aim to transform K-12 mathematics education, which is vital to building a strong national science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce and to growing industries such as quantum, artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
Launched late last year by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, CAMEL fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, uniting AI, the science of learning, education practice and data science to strengthen math education. The new awards represent the first step in a two-phase funding approach that constitutes the CAMEL initiative, establishing new interdisciplinary research networks that connect classroom educators, data scientists and researchers to bridge existing gaps between research and practice through effective collaboration focused on datasets. Together, these interdisciplinary teams will develop robust, high-value AI-ready datasets that will help uncover new insights to improve K-12 math learning, drive education technology innovation and ultimately support long-term student success.
Project outcomes are expected to further the goals of the federal executive order "Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth" as well as core NSF priorities.
The second phase of the CAMEL initiative, open to awardees of the first phase, will establish a digital platform and national hub, or "collaboratory," designed to catalyze and sustain collaboration across the new networks and foster long-term advancements in K-12 math learning.
The newly announced projects of the first phase will be supported for up to three years, with each receiving roughly $1.5 million. The projects and awardee institutions are listed below.
- Modeling the Messy: Capturing Student Reasoning within High-Dimensional Industrial AI Datasets
Award recipient: Pennsylvania State University, University Park
- Curating a Large-Scale Publicly Available Multimodal Dataset of Student Actions in Illustrative Math to Study Mathematical Misconceptions
Award recipient: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Building Integrated Data for Education, AI, and Learning to Support K-12 Mathematics Research and Practice (IDEAL-Math)
Award recipient: Florida State University
- Collaborative Research: AI-Powered Learning by Teaching for Algebraic Reasoning through Collaborative Networks
Awardees: University of Miami, University of Utah
- Collaborative Research: From Errors To Outcomes--Indicators of Procedural and Conceptual Understanding to Improve Student Learning
Awardees: Temple University, Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute, University of Delaware