Teaching-Research and Design Experiment: Two Methodologies of Integrating Research and Classroom Practice

The paper discusses the relationship between two approaches to the integration of research with teaching practice, the Design Experiment and Teaching-Research. The Design Experiment approach is based on the idea of transferring the psychological laboratory of the educational researcher directly into the mathematics classroom, so that the complexity of the synergistic life of the classroom is directly under the observation and control of the researcher. Teaching-Research (TR-NYC model) is the approach developed in urban community colleges of New York City, which allows for the application of research into classroom practice by the mathematics instructor and for the process of deriving and verifying scientific hypotheses out of classroom practice. TR-NYC model, a non-hierarchical approach to teaching-research, empowers the practitioner, cultivating the process of inquiry and adding personal meaning to the act of teaching. It is most suited to the present situation when reform is needed in most of the classrooms of mathematics. Two examples of the classroom research are provided, one from practice to educational knowledge base, and another from the research results to classroom practice.