Collaborative Research: Online Professional Enhancement and Capacity Building for Instructional Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics

This project aims to serve the national interest to advance implementation and understanding of effective practices in delivering online teaching- and learning-focused professional development to undergraduate mathematics educators. Current models for effective professional development often are expensive and restrictive regarding who can participate, largely because they require travel and other support that is neither universally available to individuals nor sustainable in the long term by institutions and individuals, thus limiting the potential impact.

To this end, the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) will implement and study a new online teaching- and learning-focused professional development program which will reach higher education professionals, including those who have been less able to travel due to various constraints. The impetus will be to determine effective use of online tools and practices to deliver professional training around themes of active learning in the mathematics classroom, leading to broad impact on mathematics instruction throughout the country, as well as the development of a large cadre of people with this skill set.

In line with this, the project will incorporate explicit efforts to build this capacity by training new workshop providers, including those who have had and continue to have scant opportunities to travel for professional development. The project will activate two levers for change at two levels: (1) empowering individuals to make research-based changes to their teaching that will enhance student learning, and (2) shaping their departmental and disciplinary cultures to support those changes.

By hosting over 40 workshops and directly serving some 1000 mathematics instructors, the project will make a lasting impact on participant knowledge, skills, and uptake of research-based instructional strategies in inclusive undergraduate mathematics instruction. These effects, in turn, will reach into undergraduate mathematics classrooms to benefit many thousands of students across the country for many years, and across all types of institutions.

This collaborative project will bring together the MAA, a long-standing source of professional development in pedagogy, curriculum, and inclusion for post-secondary mathematics, and UCB’s Ethnography & Evaluation Research (E&ER) group, an independent research group with rich experience in measuring effectiveness of professional development and institutional change in STEM. The project will operate at multiple levels to achieve several underlying goals.

First, planning, implementing, evaluating, and researching the workshops to generate new knowledge regarding best practices for online professional development models. Second, creating a professional network that aligns community needs with content expertise, provides administrative support for managing complex processes, and directs a communication plan to reach into underserved areas of the mathematics community.

Third, attracting instructors with varying interests by addressing a variety of mathematical topics, content areas, and tools. Fourth, emphasizing research-based approaches to instruction, course design, assessment. And finally, developing strategic use of synchronous and asynchronous approaches and, overall, developing best practice models for intensive and extended online workshops.

All workshops will create an inclusive classroom environment under the framework offered by the MAA Instructional Practices Guide (2018), a compendium of research-based approaches to teaching. The project design is firmly grounded in scholarship on effective instruction, professional learning, system change, and measurement. The E&ER investigators will apply a research-with-evaluation approach to measure impact of online professional development, employing Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior coupled with a component perspective of Century et.al. to implementing innovations, as conceptual frameworks for measuring individual instructors’ growth and implementation and how these depend on their professional backgrounds and instructional contexts.

Mirroring the multiple levels in which the project will operate, E&ER will also track the growth of professional development leaders who take part in project trainings, and will evaluate, research, and disseminate findings on effective evidence-based techniques for online professional development. 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.