Collaborative Research: Mathematics Graduate Student Peer-Mentorship Program: Impact and Adapability

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A critical challenge facing the United States over the next several years is to recruit and prepare a competitive workforce in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Because mathematics plays a crucial role in the STEM disciplines, student success in undergraduate mathematics courses is vital to this STEM workforce preparation. Yet, students' difficulties in obtaining a STEM degree often are attributed to their lack of being able to navigate through early undergraduate mathematics courses. This collaborative project with Bowling Green State University, the University of South Carolina at Columbia, and West Virginia University will address this important national issue by focusing on mathematical sciences graduate student instructor (GSI) training in teaching and mentoring undergraduates. Despite evidence-based results indicating that improved student learning outcomes in STEM courses often are correlated to instructors' use of student-centered techniques, GSIs typically teach introductory mathematics courses with traditional, exposition-centered methods and receive negligible training in how to use student-centered strategies to improve their overall quality of instruction. To counter this, the project will explore how a comprehensive peer mentoring approach to training mathematical sciences GSIs can impact their student-centered classroom practice and increase their students' success, particularly in early undergraduate mathematics courses. This collaborative effort will result in a comprehensive expansion of a piloted project through NSF grants 1544342/1544346. This project will have sustaining impact since a large percentage of mathematicals graduate students not only have instructional responsibilities while they are still graduate students, but also will devote a substantial portion of their workforce professional responsibilities instructing undergraduate students. An underlying goal of the project is to investigate and support development of mathematical sciences GSIs as educators who can engage and retain their undergraduate students through employment of student-centered techniques in the classroom. To address this goal, the project team will expand and study efforts on the aforementioned piloted project by developing and vetting a mentoring curriculum and observation protocol focused on evidence-based student-centered instructional practices. In turn, the project will generate a community of practice through peer mentoring support. An additional goal of the project is to determine the logistical and cultural issues surrounding adapting this peer-mentoring program at the three collaborating institutions. The researchers will employ a mixed methods approach to examine the efficacy, impact, and adaptability of their peer-mentoring program wherein experienced GSIs receive training to guide, facilitate, and support first- and second-year GSIs' teaching of foundational mathematics courses. This will involve formative evaluation and multiple cycles implementing and refining the program at the collaborating institutions. Analysis of these implementation cycles will provide evidence for the impact of this training structure on GSIs' teaching practices and will identify core features and necessary criteria associated with successfully implementing this program at different types of institutions. An overall impact will be the development and investigation of strategies and communities of practice to help develop a mathematics educator workforce that is prepared to enhance undergraduate learning and degree pursuit in STEM fields.