Ethnography of Collaborative College Teaching

合作大学教学的民族志

• 批准号: 9604981
• 负责人: Dorothy Wallace
• 金额: $ 31.87万
• 依托单位: Dartmouth College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-08-01 至 2002-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9604981&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Ethnography; Collaborative; College; Teaching

9604981 Wallace This project will document the process by which interdisciplinary mathematics and science courses are collaboratively created and taught at the undergraduate level. Dartmouth College is now beginning the second year of a five-year, NSF-funded "Mathematics Across the Curriculum" project which involves fifty faculty in the creation of over twenty new and revised courses. In one way or another, all involve the application of mathematics to problems outside its traditional academic domain; almost all involve the collaboration of a team of faculty in the design and teaching of the course. Although educational research suggests that integrating content across disciplines enhances retention and transfer of material and improves higher-order thinking skills, little information is available about how this is best accomplished at the college level. This study aims to give college faculty information that will help them do collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching and do it well. The investigation poses four questions: _How do collaborating professors face two major challenges that make integrating mathematics seem especially problematic: coordinating mathematical sequences with those of other subjects and allaying students' apprehensions about mathematics? _What does the process of collaboratively developing and teaching an interdisciplinary course look like as an intellectual and sociological experience, from beginning to end? _ How are various collaborative strategies linked with student outcomes? _ How do professors themselves characterize their experience? The research "triangulates" data from faculty interviews, ethnographic observation. and student interviews and records to answer these questions. A semi-structured interview will be conducted with each professor individually before and after the planning and teaching of each interdisciplinary course. These recorded interviews will explore their experiences, motivations, and goals in teaching these courses and their assessme nts of the results for themselves and their students. The ethnographer will also observe and take notes on planning sessions and other group meetings. These data should yield practical information about special issues encountered in integrating mathematics content, in working with colleagues from other disciplines, in addressing student responses to novel pedagogy, and in working within the established institutional organization. The interviews will also illuminate the subjective experiences of initiating this kind of reform. Data about student learning in these courses (available from pre- and post-tests, student interviews, and academic records collected in the already-funded evaluation of the MATC project) will be linked to information from faculty interviews and to results of weekly classroom observations of each MATC course. These linkages will be explored to draw conclusions about what pedagogical approaches seem most effective in improving mathematics and science learning. Administrators and college faculty outside the MATC will also be interviewed to document the cultural milieu within which reform of mathematics teaching takes place. By probing attitudes about mathematics and science of those outside its precincts and analyzing institutional organization, this study will explore the implications of college culture for interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching, and vice versa. This project thus will provide two kinds of information professors need: (1) practical information about problems encountered and solutions devised and (2) a "sense of the experience," a preview of what interdisciplinary teaching involves in personal as well as intellectual terms. The examination of university culture_focusing on the belief system about mathematics and on the institutional organization_addpesses reform issues on another level by placing mathematics reform in context and identifying factors that inhibit or promote reform efforts. The results of this research will be published widely in journal ar ticles in mathematics and education journals, through presentations at meetings, workshops and institutes, and in the form of a short, readable "how-to" manual to accompany the shelf of paperbacks produced from MATC courses.

这个项目将记录跨学科的数学和科学课程是如何在本科阶段合作创建和教授的。达特茅斯学院现在开始了一个由美国国家科学基金会资助的为期五年的“数学贯穿课程”项目的第二年，该项目涉及50名教师，他们将创建20多个新的和修订的课程。以这样或那样的方式，所有这些都涉及到将数学应用于其传统学术领域之外的问题；几乎所有的课程都涉及到一组教师在课程设计和教学方面的合作。尽管教育研究表明，跨学科整合内容可以提高材料的记忆和转移，并提高更高层次的思维能力，但关于如何在大学水平上最好地完成这一目标的信息很少。本研究旨在提供大学教师资讯，帮助他们做好合作、跨学科的教学。这项调查提出了四个问题：合作教授如何面对两大挑战，这两大挑战使得整合数学显得特别困难：协调数学序列与其他学科的序列，以及减轻学生对数学的担忧？从开始到结束，作为一种智力和社会学经验，合作开发和教授一门跨学科课程的过程是什么样的？_各种合作策略是如何与学生的成绩联系在一起的？_教授们如何描述自己的经历？这项研究“三角测量”了来自教师访谈和人种学观察的数据。以及学生的访谈和记录来回答这些问题。在每门跨学科课程的规划和教学前后，将对每位教授进行半结构化的访谈。这些记录的访谈将探讨他们的经验，动机和教学这些课程的目标，以及他们对自己和学生的结果的评估。人种学家还将观察并记录计划会议和其他小组会议。这些数据应该产生关于在整合数学内容时遇到的特殊问题的实用信息，在与其他学科的同事合作时，在解决学生对新教学法的反应时，以及在已建立的机构组织内工作时。访谈也将阐明发起这种改革的主观经验。学生在这些课程中学习的数据（可从前期和后期测试、学生访谈和已资助的MATC项目评估中收集的学术记录中获得）将与教师访谈的信息和每门MATC课程的每周课堂观察结果相关联。这些联系将被探讨，以得出结论，什么教学方法似乎在提高数学和科学学习最有效。MATC以外的管理人员和大学教师也将接受采访，以记录数学教学改革发生的文化环境。本研究借由探讨大学外学生对数学和科学的态度，以及分析大学组织，来探讨大学文化对跨学科、合作教学的影响，反之亦然。因此，这个项目将提供教授需要的两种信息：(1)关于遇到的问题和设计的解决方案的实用信息；(2)“体验感”，即跨学科教学在个人和智力方面所涉及的预览。对大学文化的考察——聚焦于对数学的信仰体系和机构组织——通过将数学改革置于背景中并确定抑制或促进改革努力的因素，在另一个层面上解决改革问题。这项研究的结果将广泛发表在数学和教育期刊的期刊文章中，通过在会议、研讨会和研究所的演讲，以及以一份简短、可读的“操作”手册的形式，与MATC课程制作的平装书书架一起发表。