Collaborative Research: Undergraduate Teaching and Learning in Mathematics With Open Software and Textbooks

这一改善本科STEM教育(IUSE)开发和实施项目旨在应对本科STEM课程中的挑战，特别是促进学生学习以及数学和计算技能发展的需要。具体地说，这个项目关注的是免费在线版本的开源数学教科书。它试图理解两个相互关联的问题：“教师和学生如何使用教科书？”以及“我们如何才能开发出更好地支持教与学的教科书？”为了回答这些问题，该项目将完成一项全面的教育研究研究，其中包括从各种环境中的多个教室收集数据，并随后对这些数据进行分析。该项目的开发部分将重点放在借口上，这是一个旨在鼓励创建免费、开放源码教科书的出版系统。该项目将审查现有使用借口创建的书籍的使用情况，并根据这些观察进一步开发借口平台，使开放源码教科书能够具有更高的有效性。研究和开发活动的整合旨在创造研究和开发活动之间的持续创新循环。该项目的教育研究部分将研究在两年制学院和四年制学院和大学教授的49门课程。这些课程包括一年级微积分、二年级线性代数和高阶抽象代数。这项研究将调查教师在计划和教授来自在线教科书的课程方面的工作，以及学生使用相同的教科书学习材料时的工作。此外，这项研究将把这些工作与教师和学生在使用动态较少的资源时所做的工作进行对比，例如，相同材料的PDF或装订副本。Preext是一个新的创作平台，使作者能够轻松地为印刷(静态)和在线(动态)格式设计教科书，包括在线版本中的计算和交互组件。该项目将继续开发借口和技术基础，以创建高质量的在线教科书版本，同时只要求作者专注于其内容。为残疾读者提供的无障碍功能将进一步得到改善。在线借口书的固有技术结构将允许自动收集学生教科书使用数据，按个人读者组织，分辨率精确到分钟，并在单个组件的水平上，如观看视频。这种研究和开发活动之间的相互作用将产生大量关于学生使用教科书的高质量数据。美国数学研究所的开放式教科书倡议将继续并扩大其在审查和推荐优质免费和低成本教科书方面的领导地位，并帮助其他STEM学科采用其成功的评估标准。讲师、作者和软件开发人员的研讨会将融合传播、专业发展、编辑审查和软件开发。这些研讨会的一个新特点将是教授测试现场教师如何为他们在课程中使用的开放源码教科书的改进做出贡献。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Development and Implementation project aims to address challenges in the undergraduate STEM curriculum, particularly the need to promote student learning and the development of mathematical and computational skills. Specifically, this project focuses on open source mathematics textbooks that are available in free online versions. It seeks to understand two interrelated questions: "How do instructors and students use textbooks?" and "How can we develop textbooks that better support teaching and learning?" To answer these questions, the project will complete a comprehensive educational research study that includes gathering data from multiple classrooms in a variety of settings, and subsequent analysis of that data. The development portion of the project will focus on PreTeXt, a publishing system designed to encourage the creation of free, open source textbooks. The project will examine the use of existing books created with PreTeXt, and from these observations further develop the PreTeXt platform, so that open source textbooks can have increased effectiveness. The integration of research and development activities is designed to create a continuous cycle of innovation between the research and development activities. The education research component of this project will study 49 courses taught at two-year colleges, and four-year colleges and universities. These courses include first-year calculus, second-year linear algebra, and upper-division abstract algebra. The research study will investigate the work of instructors in planning and teaching lessons drawn from an online textbook and the work of students as they use the same textbooks to learn the material. In addition, the study will contrast such work with the work that instructors and students do when using less dynamic resources, e.g., a PDF or bound copy of the same material. PreTeXt is a new authoring platform that enables authors to easily fashion a textbook for both print (static) and online (dynamic) formats, including both computational and interactive components in the online version. The project will continue the development of PreTeXt and the technical underpinnings to create high quality online versions of textbooks, while only requiring authors to concentrate on their content. The accessibility features for readers with disabilities will be further improved. The inherent technical structure of online PreTeXt books will allow automated collection of student textbook usage data, organized by individual reader, with resolution to the minute and at the level of individual components, such as viewing a video. This interplay between research and development activities will produce large amounts of high-quality data about students' use of their textbooks. The Open Textbook Initiative at the American Institute of Mathematics will continue and expand its leadership in vetting and recommending quality free and low-cost textbooks, and help other STEM disciplines to adopt its successful evaluation criteria. Workshops for instructors, authors, and software developers will blend dissemination, professional development, editorial review, and software development. A novel feature of these workshops will be teaching test-site instructors how to contribute to the improvement of the open source textbooks that they are using in their courses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.