The Teacher-As-Researcher (TAR) 2011 Award recipient, Lisa Ames, graduated from Bucknell University in 2007 with a B.A. in Mathematics and a minor in Education. Since then she has been a middle and high school mathematics teacher at Wood-Ridge High School in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey. As a first year teacher, Lisa immediately enrolled in the Teaching Children Mathematics M.Ed. program at William Paterson University where she has distinguished herself as an excellent student and completed her degree in May 2011. Her master's thesis served as the basis for the classroom research project, The Effect of Geometer's Sketchpad on High School Students' Conceptual Knowledge of Quadrilaterals, Inductive Reasoning, and Motivation, for which she won the TAR award.

Ever since Lisa was in middle school, Lisa dreamed of becoming a mathematics teacher. She felt that her own love of mathematics would enable her to teach others to appreciate what is often perceived as a difficult and uninteresting field of study. What she found as a first year teacher was that it was a real challenge to teach students with a wide range of abilities including gifted youngsters and students with learning disabilities. She decided she needed to know more about adapting her curriculum and teaching strategies to meet all of her students' needs. Lisa pursued this direction within her master's program and by attending additional workshops that began to transform her teaching. By the time she got to her fourth year of teaching, she really felt that she was able to reach most, if not all of her students, by examining their individual understandings of the mathematics that she was teaching and proceeding with instruction from that vantage point. In teaching high school geometry, though, Lisa was still a bit stumped about how to teach some very difficult subject matter beyond a rote or procedural level. This concern led Lisa to conduct the research with her own students that led to her receipt of the receiving this year's TAR award.

As Lisa searched for ways to make the geometry learning of her students more conceptual rather than procedural, she found that technology could play a very large role in student success. In particular, she read a lot about the effectiveness of using the Geometer's Sketchpad, an interactive computer application that allows students to construct and compare geometric figures and relationships in a virtual environment. She saw reports that this software was supposed to provide all students with the motivation to learn more about geometry concepts through an inductive reasoning process, but she was not sure if this would be more effective with her own students than the way she had been teaching them without the software.

1. Would students learn more about geometric properties through this highly visual discovery-based technology tool than through using paper and pencil constructions to illustrate geometric properties as it is usually taught?
   
2. Would students be able to solve more conceptually-related problem sets about the properties of quadrilaterals using an inductive method of reasoning when working with the Geometer's Sketchpad than they would when working with paper and pencil constructions?
   
3. Would students' motivation to solve geometry problems be greater when using the Geometer's Sketchpad than without it?

In order to test her hypotheses, Lisa worked with 38 tenth and eleventh grade students enrolled in two of her geometry classes. Students from both grades were in each class. Both classes were given the same basic instruction and worked on the same problems, but the first period class with 18 students worked on the problems using the Geometer's Sketchpad while the fifth period class with 20 students worked on the problems using only pencil and paper and other manual construction tools such as rulers. Both before and after instruction, the students were given a 10-question multiple-choice test and a 10-question open-ended test, both of which were intended to measure students' knowledge of the geometry content to be learned. Students also completed a 10-question motivation questionnaire about their attitudes toward geometry. Instruction lasted for 6 weeks.

By comparing pre-intervention and post-intervention test results, Lisa found that the Sketchpad group did no better than the paper and pencil group on the multiple-choice test of knowledge of properties of quadrilaterals, but that the Sketchpad group did perform significantly better than the paper and pencil group on the open-ended assessment that required more inductive reasoning. This suggested to Lisa that while students could learn facts about properties equally well under either method of instruction, the Geometer's Sketchpad seemed to increase students' abilities to reason and figure out relationships about the properties of quadrilaterals. She noted, though, that the motivation questionnaire did not show any significant differences between the groups on the before and after measures indicating that either the measure was not really getting at the effects of using the technology or that the use of the technology was not apparent after such a short trial.

Based on her research, Lisa plans to continue to use the Geometer's Sketchpad for additional concepts and procedures in her geometry curriculum in the future and will try to determine if the impact of using the application will have long-range effects and the extent to which it will be effective with different kinds of students.