Collaborative Research: Teaching Inquiry-oriented Mathematics: Establishing Supports

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Improving mathematics instruction and learning is a priority for increasing the success and persistence of undergraduate students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The central goal of this collaborative project (including Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Florida State University and North Carolina State University) is to develop an understanding of what is needed to support instructional change in undergraduate mathematics. In particular, the project will design, investigate, and evaluate a system of supports for mathematics instructors interested in implementing student-centered curricular innovations. Such curricular innovations have been shown to support conceptual learning gains, diminish the achievement gap, and improve STEM retention rates. However, research has also found that simply developing and disseminating curricular innovations fails to support meaningful instructional change. By developing and researching a system of supports for instructional change, the project will address this particularly important (and often missing) component needed for taking curricular innovations to scale. By supporting instructional change, and therefore supporting the propagation of research-based curricular innovations, the project will have broad impacts on undergraduate STEM education. These impacts include: improving instruction for STEM students, thus broadening the pipeline for undergraduate students pursuing STEM careers; advancing teaching practices and instruction that have been shown to be particularly beneficial for women and minority students in STEM; and, developing an infrastructure and model that can be used to support instructional change and professional development in other undergraduate STEM areas. The project will research the following question: How can the program better support instructional improvement in undergraduate mathematics? More specifically, what are the relationships among instructional supports, instructors, and instruction that are important for informing effective instructional change? To do this, the project will design, investigate, and evaluate a system of supports for mathematicians interested in instructional change. The instructional support model will consist of three interrelated components: curricular support materials, summer workshops, and online instructor work groups. These supports will be developed using design-based research including iterative cycles of designing, field-testing, analyzing, and refining. The project will then investigate instructor change in the context of our model. This investigation will focus on the relationships and interactions between the supports, the instructors, and their instructional practices. Finally, in order to evaluate the program's instructional support model, the project will assess student learning and develop a measure for inquiry-oriented instruction. In addition to assessing the efficacy of the support model, the project will use the evaluation tools to identify aspects of the supports and instruction that have a positive impact on students' learning.