JMSCE Special Issue I
Special Issue on SUMMIT-P
Susan Ganter and Bill Haver
The challenge faced by developers of collegiate mathematics curricula is to determine—and then provide—the mathematical experiences that are true to the spirit of mathematics yet also relevant to students’ futures in other fields. The Curriculum Foundations Project (CF) of MAA/CRAFTY was designed to gather input from partner disciplines through a series of 22 two- to three-day workshops. Each workshop resulted in a report directed to the mathematics community, summarizing the workshop’s recommendations and conclusions. One message from the partner disciplines appeared again and again: introductory collegiate mathematics courses should focus on giving students an understanding of fundamental mathematical topics while grounding the discussions in context. The National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships (SUMMIT-P) is a group of 16 institutions working to implement the ideals from the CF recommendations. Full participation from partner discipline faculty in this process is a key ingredient in successfully redeveloping introductory mathematics courses in a way that incorporates the contextual needs of other disciplines. The papers in this special issue speak to the work of the SUMMIT-P consortium, focusing on the processes used for successful interdisciplinary collaboration.
Stella K. Hofrenning, Rosalyn Hobson Hargraves, Tao Chen, Afroditi Vennie Filippas, Rhonda Fitzgerald, John Hearn, Lori J. Kayes, Joan Kunz, and Rebecca Segal
A National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships project (SUMMIT-P) is a collaboration of institutions focused on revising first- and second-year mathematics courses with the help of partner disciplines with prerequisite mathematics courses. This paper describes the fishbowl discussion technique used by the consortium members to encourage interdisciplinary conversation. Vignettes describing the results of conversations that occurred at several consortium member institutions are provided by the co-authors.
Victor Piercey, Rebecca Segal, Afroditi Filippas, Tao Chen, Soloman Kone, Rosalyn Hargraves, Jack Bookman, John Hearn, Debbie Pike, and Kathy Williams PhD
The SUMMIT-P project is a multi-institutional endeavor to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration in order to improve the teaching of undergraduate mathematics courses in the first two years of college. One goal of this work is to establish collaborative communities among the institutions involved. As part of the project, institutions visit one another on site visits that are structured according to a common protocol. The site visits have been valuable to the project. Participating institutions report the exchange of actionable ideas and feedback; members of the grant leadership team have used the site visits to direct the overall project, and evaluators have refined questions and identified trends that will help their assessment of the project. At a deeper level, the site visits have created a strong sense of community among those involved in every aspect of the SUMMIT-P project.
Rosalyn H. Hargraves, Stella K. Hofrenning, Janet Bowers, Mary D.R. Beisiegel, Victor Piercey, and Erica Slate Young
A National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships (SUMMIT-P), funded by the National Science Foundation, is a multi-institutional consortium with members from twelve institutions. The consortium adapted two protocols developed by the School Reform Initiative to: 1. provide advice on challenges or dilemmas a consortium member is facing and 2. share project successes with consortium members. The two protocols—a Modified Descriptive Consultancy protocol and a Modified Success Analysis with Reflective Questions protocol—provide a structured format for these discussions. This paper provides an in-depth description of the two protocols and how they have been used for this project. Examples demonstrating the impact of the protocols are provided by the co-authors.
Janet Bowers, Kathy Williams, Antoni Luque, Devon Quick, Mary Beisiegel, Jody Sorensen, Joan Kunz, Diane Smith, and Lori Kayes
Research has shown that undergraduate students benefit from seeing examples of mathematics applied to real-world situations. This article describes three different paradigms for how math and discipline partner faculty worked together to create mathematical activities that illustrate applications of the topics being studied in precalculus and calculus. All three examples are discussed within the framework of PDSA cycles to describe the process by which the teams collaborated to plan, enact, study, and refine their lessons. Findings discuss both the difficulties of creating integrated activities (differences in terms and definitions between math and science faculty, different foregrounding of math versus science among faculty), and the value of the resultant lessons, such as increased level of student engagement, higher cognitive demand, and the role that relevant applications can play in piquing student interest in STEM.
Rhonda Bishop, Victor Piercey, and Mischelle Stone
As part of a multi-institution, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant-funded project, Ferris State University (FSU) joins a national effort to reform mathematics curricula. Researchers from FSU developed and facilitated a faculty learning community (FLC) as one strategy to redesign the traditional approach to the quantitative reasoning skill development of students in the departments of mathematics, nursing, social work, and the College of Business. Over the course of one academic year, the FLC provided an interdisciplinary faculty connection to develop pedagogical approaches that integrated cross-curricular concepts and context from each discipline. The FLC not only produced uniquely designed, learning-centered approaches to teaching quantitative reasoning but created a sense of community and camaraderie that promoted faculty development and the scholarship of teaching.
Janet Bowers, Bryan D. Poole, Caroline Maher-Boulis, Ashley Schwartz, Angelica Bloomquist, and Erica Slate Young
The article by Poole, Turner, and Maher-Boulis (2020) describes one way in which undergraduates have been used to support the SUMMIT-P goal of investigating examples of how mathematics and statistics are applied in partner discipline courses. Two other universities in the SUMMIT-P consortium, San Diego State University and Oregon State University, also use undergraduates in different ways to support the work of integrating science applications into math classes. In this article, we compare and contrast these three uses to further highlight this somewhat untapped resource.
Mary Beisiegel, Lori Kayes, Devon Quick, Richard Nafshun, Michael Lopez, Steve Dobrioglo, and Michael Dickens
In this paper, we describe our process for developing applied problems from biology and chemistry for use in a differential calculus course. We describe our conversations and curricular analyses that led us to change from our initial focus on college algebra to calculus. We provide results that allowed us to see the overlaps between biology and mathematics and chemistry and mathematics and led to a specific focus on problems related to rates of change. Finally, we investigate the problems that were developed by the partner disciplines for use on recitation activities in calculus and how those problems were modified by the calculus coordinator. We compare what partner disciplines emphasize in scientific applications with what mathematics instructors emphasize in calculus and consider what that means for students’ understanding of science in mathematics. We also describe the role of the students, partner discipline colleagues, and calculus instructors in the development, refinement, and use of the problems.
Jason Robinson, Patricia McClung, Caroline Maher-Boulis, Jennifer Cornett, and Beth Fugate
This paper outlines the process of establishing a stronger and more reciprocal partnership for collaboration between an education preparation program and a local education agency. The essential partners identified included the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the College of Education at Lee University and stakeholders in the local school district. First, this paper will discuss a theoretical framework that speaks to the importance of dialogue and a dialogic approach to teaching mathematics. Secondly, the processes and methods of the project involving collaboration through partnerships are described. These partnerships gave rise to the realization that coursework would be more effective if it mirrored the instructional practices of local education agencies. A detailed description of the process of changes to the coursework and initial outcomes of the project are outlined. Included are questions and recommendations for further collaboration.
Choon Shan Lai, Glenn Henshaw, Tao Chen, and Soloman Kone
Many students consider mathematics too abstract and useless for their academic and career goals. Meanwhile, instructors in quantitative disciplines such as economics find many students mathematically underprepared for their courses. The disconnect between students’ perceptions of the utility of mathematics and their life and career may have contributed to some of the under-performance in learning mathematics. Addressing this problem requires collaboration across disciplines to develop an understanding of each other’s needs, more specifically to develop an integrative platform that allows students to apply mathematical skills in interdisciplinary contexts (Ganter & Barker, 2004). We collaboratively designed and implemented an integrative platform that includes creation of assignments and resources that contextualize the course in College Algebra with applications of economics, facilitation of frequent interdisciplinary dialogues among faculty members, creation of a course pair, and expansion of the platform to include 15 sections of College Algebra. This paper describes the process of the design and implementation of the platform.
Maila Brucal-Hallare, Shahrooz Moosavizadeh, and Makarand Deo
Norfolk State University (NSU) is the only public Historically Black College and University (HBCU) member institution in SUMMIT-P. At NSU, a strong collaboration between the Department of Mathematics and its partner discipline, the Department of Engineering, has been established for the Calculus I and Differential Equations classes as part of the SUMMIT-P project. In this paper, we record a brief history of this collaboration project at NSU, the various structures within the SUMMIT-P Project, the site visit that occurred in Spring 2019, and how recent activities helped guide the direction of the project at NSU.
Bryan D. Poole, Linden Turner, and Caroline Maher-Boulis
Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary for students’ professional preparation (Laird et al., 2014; Repko, 2014) and may promote effective learning transfer of course content. Such collaborations have resulted in enhanced problem-solving skills and conceptual understanding of statistics content (Dierker et al., 2012; Everett, 2016; Hammersley et al., 2019; Woodzicka et al., 2015). As a result of ongoing collaborations between faculty members in different disciplines and at different universities, we created a “Student Exchange Program” to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate students in mathematics and social sciences. In the current paper, we describe past research that informed the design of this program, the specific steps taken to implement the program, preliminary results, and potential challenges to implementing and maintaining such an initiative.
Anil Venkatesh and Erin Militzer
By collaborating with partner disciplines, mathematics educators gain valuable insight into the perspectives and needs of their students. This insight can lead to improved coordination of content and methods between courses in mathematics and the partner disciplines. This curricular coordination not only invites students to apply their mathematical knowledge in their own professional contexts, but also allows students to communicate mathematical mastery in the language of their intended professions. In this paper, we discuss the challenges specific to developing a mathematics course in collaboration with partner disciplines, with particular attention to portability to a wide range of math instructors. We identify three key obstacles to portability: instructor familiarity with application domains, variety of assessment styles, and grading consistency. We describe how each of these obstacles is addressed and discuss strategies that have helped new instructors be successful in teaching the course.
Mike May, Rebecca Segal, Victor Piercey, and Tao Chen
Very few great ideas in teaching are without ancestors or descendants. This paper presents a case study in how one particular pedagogical project, the work at Saint Louis University as part of the National Science Foundation supported SUMMIT-P consortium, borrowed from other sources. The particular project was an interdisciplinary collaboration to make mathematics education more effective for business students. The various borrowings are treated in roughly chronological order from initial inspiration through planned adoption and adaptation of the work of others to the addition of features that only became available mid-project. The kinds of sources include a particular business calculus project, a pedagogical movement, other members of the SUMMIT-P consortium, and independent math technology projects including PreTeXt, WeBWorK, and GeoGebra.
Erica Slate Young, Bryanne Peterson, Sarah Schott, and Jack Bookman
SUMMIT-P consists of nine participating institutions working toward common goals but from unique perspectives. Evaluating such a large-scale project with diverse stakeholders has presented challenges. For one, evaluation on this scale necessitates a team effort rather than a single evaluator. Communication is key among the evaluators as well as among the project players at large. Participation and reliable, timely feedback from participants are perhaps the most important issues while also posing some of our greatest challenges. We present strategies we developed to counteract these challenges. In particular, we discuss the development of an assessment tracking system used to not only monitor responses but to also promote an increase in on-time responses. We conclude with a discussion of some lessons learned about evaluating large-scale, multi-site projects to share with other evaluators and PIs alike.
Mary D.R. Beisiegel and Suzanne I. Dorée
There is a national call to improve the mathematics curricula in the first two undergraduate years to improve student success and engagement. But curricular change happens in an institutional context: Who are the students, and what do they need to succeed? What is the climate for change? Does the department regularly revise its courses and curriculum? Is it common for different departments to collaborate on curricular change? What supports or obstacles does the department, college, or university have for changing the curriculum? Who are the institutional stakeholders, and what practices build their buy-in? In the SUMMIT-P project, nine different institutions ranging from small private colleges to mid-sized state universities to large public universities and a community college worked on changing the undergraduate mathematics curricula in the first two years. This paper examines the context at each institution in the project. We hope that other institutions looking to follow in our collaboration with the partner disciplines on revising the introductory mathematics curriculum at their institution will find a familiar context in one (or more) of these institutions. We include a list of questions that programs can use to examine their own institutional context.