Evaluation of Digital Resources: The “How” and “What for”

Abstract

The work of (mathematics) teachers with resources is considered as an important part of teachers’ professional activity: They select, adapt, modify, and combine existing resources and create new ones. Nowadays, the omnipresence of digital resources has significantly impacted this work, which orients research in mathematics education to studying how teachers select and appropriate digital resources, or how they enact them in a classroom. This chapter focuses on the evaluation of digital resources that is at the heart of these processes. The chapter is structured around three main themes: an overview of the use of digital resources by the main actors of education – teachers and students, aiming at highlighting the variety of existing digital resources and issues related to their use; the concept of quality of digital resources; and the approaches to quality evaluation including the theoretical and methodological frameworks, criteria, and modalities. Examples taken from different educational contexts illustrate some of these approaches. The chapter concludes by highlighting a complexity of processes related to digital resource evaluation due to a great variety of resources that call for considering specific aspects and therefore lead to elaboration of particular frameworks.