Collaborative Research: A National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-Institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships (SUMMIT-P)

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In conjunction with the Committee on Curriculum Renewal Across the First Two Years (CRAFTY) of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), a consortium of eleven institutions will collaborate to revise and improve the curriculum for lower division undergraduate mathematics courses. A key element of these innovations will be interdisciplinary partnerships, with partner disciplines directly involved in decisions about curricular needs. Collectively, the consortium will impact over 52,000 undergraduate students and 200 college faculty from a wide array of disciplines through implementing major recommendations from the MAA Curriculum Foundations (CF) Project and changing the undergraduate mathematics curriculum in ways that support improved STEM learning for all students while building the STEM workforce of tomorrow. The project will also foster a network of cross-disciplinary faculty in order to promote community and institutional transformation through shared experiences and ideas for successfully creating functional interdisciplinary partnerships within and across institutions. Materials and ideas generated by the curricular changes and the interdisciplinary collaborative process will be widely disseminated through workshops at national conferences, two journal special issues, extensive publications, and open webinars. This project will be based on research about the needs of partner disciplines, as identified in a series of 22 workshops organized by CRAFTY. At each of the eleven participating institutions in the project, mathematics and partner discipline faculty will collaborate to better understand the CF recommendations, determine how these recommendations can be used to effectively improve the content of affected courses, introduce modifications in pilot sections, work with a central evaluation team to measure the effectiveness of new approaches (especially as it pertains to students from underrepresented groups), offer workshops and support for instructors using these new curricula (locally, regionally, and nationally), and scale-up these new offerings within the consortium and through dissemination to additional campuses. The central evaluation will yield extensive, consistently-collected data to accurately determine the effects of innovative partnerships and resulting curricular changes. Additionally, the project will contribute significantly to the Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) knowledge-base and generate a greater understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of mathematics within the broader undergraduate curriculum.