The Inquiry-Based Learning Regional Communities Project

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this Exploration and Design project aims to serve the national interest by developing regional communities to support inquiry-based learning (IBL) in mathematics. It also aims to recruit and help new faculty from diverse institutions implement IBL in undergraduate mathematics courses. The project will bring together faculty representatives from four regional IBL communities: the Maryland-DC-Virginia IBL Consortium, Michigan IBL Consortium, Midwest Regional IBL Community, and the New England IBL in Mathematics Consortium. These faculty representatives will work together to investigate the potential for regional communities of IBL practitioners to support faculty in adopting, sustaining, and promoting the use of IBL in undergraduate mathematics education. This IBL Communities model will provide the ongoing support that instructors need to successfully adopt and sustain IBL strategies in the classroom. Furthermore, regional IBL communities have the potential to broadly impact mathematics education by creating synergy among diverse groups of IBL practitioners who will in turn garner support for IBL among other faculty, administrators, policy makers, and funders across each region. The overarching goal of the project is to provide targeted support to nurture the growth of the four regional IBL communities represented on the project team and to investigate the impact of these communities in each region. The expectation is that the project's investigations will elucidate which community-building strategies are most effective in supporting faculty to adopt, sustain, and promote the use of IBL in undergraduate mathematics education. In support of this goal, the project team will collaborate with leaders in each of the four regions to pursue the following objectives: 1) establish and coordinate a Network of IBL Communities; 2) plan and implement regional IBL Communities workshops; 3) facilitate the planning and implementation of peer-collaboration activities in the regional IBL communities; 4) broaden participation in the regional IBL communities among faculty from groups that are underrepresented in STEM as well as among faculty from institution types that are underrepresented in the national IBL community; and 5) investigate the ability of regional IBL communities to provide faculty with the professional support they need to adopt, sustain, and promote IBL. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.