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1. Project adelante: An anti-deficit professional development program for university mathematics instructors

   Adiredja, Aditya; Civil, Marta; Jarnutowski, Becca (October 2024, RUME Proceedings)

   Cook, S; Katz, B; Moore-Russo, D (Ed.)

   In this report, we share the design of a year-long professional development program for university math instructors that we developed and refined as the Anti-deficit Learning and Teaching Project (Adelante). The program is a community learning project wherein minoritized students, STEM peer mentors, and math instructors (graduate students and instructional faculty) build relationships as they share their knowledge and experiences with race, gender, and mathematics. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billing, 1995) frames the goals of the community learning in terms of deep mathematical knowledge, cultural knowledge, and sociopolitical consciousness. The program activities are inspired by the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project (Moll et al., 1992) wherein teachers are offered opportunities to build meaningful relationships with students and their communities. An anti-deficit perspective (Adiredja et al., 2020) guides the learning experience for all participants. Not only are minoritized students assumed to have cultural and intellectual assets for learning, but the project also aims to dismantle deficit master narratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) about these students and their capacity to learn. Instructors worked on explicitly challenging deficit narratives about their students as they engaged in the program’s activities. The project also takes an anti-deficit approach to instructor development, focusing on their individual growth and agency, joy in teaching, and mental health. We also position ourselves as learners to the experience and wisdom of the staff and students at the university cultural centers. The core activities for the PD engage teachers to: (a) participate in five PD meetings on anti- deficit teaching and Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) teaching method; (b) lead a five-day math summer bridge workshop in Pre-Calculus, Calculus I, II, Vector Calculus, or Linear Algebra immediately following the meetings; (c) participate in critical conversations about race and gender in STEM with students at the cultural centers; (d) conduct a semi-structure interview with one of their students from the summer workshop about their STEM experience; and (e) participate in group reflection meetings debriefing their experience in the activities. Preliminary analysis of two of the three cohorts of participants found that most instructors developed a more humanizing approach to their teaching and their students (Gutiérrez, 2018). IBL helped instructors to explicitly challenge deficit narratives about minoritized students in the classroom, wherein most observed their students engaging in deep mathematical reasoning. Interviewing one of their students also shifted deficit narratives that developed in the classroom for some instructors. The workshop served as a space to try out previously learned teaching ideas (student centered teaching) without constraints from curriculum and assessments. Doing so reinvigorated many instructors’ passion for teaching, especially those who are more experienced. 

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2. Linking Biodiversity Data Using Evolutionary History

   https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.36207  

   McTavish, Emily Jane (June 2019, Biodiversity Information Science and Standards)

   All life on earth is linked by a shared evolutionary history. Even before Darwin developed the theory of evolution, Linnaeus categorized types of organisms based on their shared traits. We now know these traits derived from these species’ shared ancestry. This evolutionary history provides a natural framework to harness the enormous quantities of biological data being generated today. The Open Tree of Life project is a collaboration developing tools to curate and share evolutionary estimates (phylogenies) covering the entire tree of life (Hinchliff et al. 2015, McTavish et al. 2017). The tree is viewable at https://tree.opentreeoflife.org, and the data is all freely available online. The taxon identifiers used in the Open Tree unified taxonomy (Rees and Cranston 2017) are mapped to identifiers across biological informatics databases, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), NCBI, and others. Linking these identifiers allows researchers to easily unify data from across these different resources (Fig. 1). Leveraging a unified evolutionary framework across the diversity of life provides new avenues for integrative wide scale research. Downstream tools, such as R packages developed by the R OpenSci foundation (rotl, rgbif) (Michonneau et al. 2016, Chamberlain 2017) and others tools (Revell 2012), make accessing and combining this information straightforward for students as well as researchers (e.g. https://mctavishlab.github.io/BIO144/labs/rotl-rgbif.html). Figure 1. Example linking phylogenetic relationships accessed from the Open Tree of Life with specimen location data from Global Biodiversity Information Facility. For example, a recent publication by Santorelli et al. 2018 linked evolutionary information from Open Tree with species locality data gathered from a local field study as well as GBIF species location records to test a river-barrier hypothesis in the Amazon. By combining these data, the authors were able test a widely held biogeographic hypothesis across 1952 species in 14 taxonomic groups, and found that a river that had been postulated to drive endemism, was in fact not a barrier to gene flow. However, data provenance and taxonomic name reconciliation remain key hurdles to applying data from these large digital biodiversity and evolution community resources to answering biological questions. In the Amazonian river analysis, while they leveraged use of GBIF records as a secondary check on their species records, they relied on their an intensive local field study for their major conclusions, and preferred taxon specific phylogenetic resources over Open Tree where they were available (Santorelli et al. 2018). When Li et al. 2018 assessed large scale phylogenetic approaches, including Open Tree, for measuring community diversity, they found that synthesis phylogenies were less resolved than purpose-built phylogenies, but also found that these synthetic phylogenies were sufficient for community level phylogenetic diversity analyses. Nonetheless, data quality concerns have limited adoption of analyses data from centralized resources (McTavish et al. 2017). Taxonomic name recognition and reconciliation across databases also remains a hurdle for large scale analyses, despite several ongoing efforts to improve taxonomic interoperability and unify taxonomies, such at Catalogue of Life + (Bánki et al. 2018). In order to support innovative science, large scale digital data resources need to facilitate data linkage between resources, and address researchers' data quality and provenance concerns. I will present the model that the Open Tree of Life is using to provide evolutionary data at the scale of the entire tree of life, while maintaining traceable provenance to the publications and taxonomies these evolutionary relationships are inferred from. I will discuss the hurdles to adoption of these large scale resources by researchers, as well as the opportunities for new research avenues provided by the connections between evolutionary inferences and biodiversity digital databases. 

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3. The Role of Reasoning with Quantities in Undergraduates’ Modeling Activities

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40753-025-00273-7  

   Kularajan, Sindura; Czocher, Jennifer_A (July 2025, International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Abstract Mathematical modeling is challenging for learners across all grade bands. Given its crucial role in STEM education, it is essential for the field to design learning environments that foster the optimal learning of modeling. One promising strategy is to support the learning of modeling as conceiving a situation consisting of quantities and quantitative relationships. However, before promoting the learning of modeling in this way, the field first needs accounts of how quantitative reasoningispresent in students’ mathematical modeling activities. Drawing data from individual teaching experiments with three undergraduate STEM majors, we analyzed the ways in which reasoning with quantities manifest as they mathematically modeled dynamic situations. Through our analysis, we illustrate eight types of manifestations, making explicit connections between the modeling activities and participants' reasonings with quantities during each manifestation. Our findings indicate that learners’ modeling activities are afforded through their reasonings with quantities and suggest that students’ quantitative reasoning can be leveraged to support the learning of mathematical modeling. 

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4. Creating Opportunities to Help Students Be Prepared for Careers in a STEM Field

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36874  

   Reilly, Edel (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This presentation reports on an ongoing National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) funded project in the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). The goals of the project include increasing the number of students graduating with a major, minor, or Master’s degree in mathematics; strengthening the academic culture in the department; and strengthening the relationships within the broader STEM community within and beyond the university. The project aims to achieve these goals by providing financial assistance to students in need to pursue their degree and developing a series of activities each semester designed to strengthen relationships within the academic and STEM communities. Ways in which the goals of the project are being met will be shared including: recruiting strategies used to get students into the program; offering of activities in the form of presentations and workshops to help students prepare for careers the STEM industry; peer-led tutoring sessions to help with academic success in mathematics classes, and monthly meetings in which participants present original research. Data collected from student surveys at the end of each semester will be reported. Finally, the impact of transitioning to online learning as a result of COVID-19 in the middle of a semester on a project that focuses on community development will be shared. In addition, to students’ responses to online learning data collected from faculty teaching in STEM disciplines will also be shared. The following sources of information were used for this presentation; quantitative and qualitative data gathered from End of Semester surveys, student reflection narratives concerning their small group activities, and reports that summarizes and evaluates the peer-led team learning sessions. 

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5. An Initial Analysis of Undergraduate Student Mental Models of Product Design

   https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2020-22459  

   Driscoll, Jessica R.; Hoffenson, Steven; Pitterson, Nicole (August 2020, ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Design is a concept that means different things to different people. Even in the engineering design research community, there is little agreement on a consistent definition of design. This study looks into how engineering students understand product design, using a concept mapping exercise to elicit the key concepts and relationships present in their mental models. An analysis of concept maps from 130 third-year undergraduate engineering students shows how these students think about design, the common themes and relationships that are seen across the population, and variations across different groups of students. By understanding how students in the midst of ABET-accredited programs conceptualize design, conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness of existing curricula in instilling a complete understanding of holistic product design. This can lead to recommendations regarding future engineering design learning objectives, teaching materials, and activities. 

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