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1. A Broad Doorway to the Big Tent: A Four-Strand Model for Discipline-Based Faculty Development on Inquiry-Based Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10511970.2022.2072427  

   Yoshinobu, Stan; Jones, Matthew G.; Hayward, Charles N.; Schumacher, Carol; Laursen, Sandra L. (April 2022, PRIMUS)

   Faculty professional development is an important lever for change in supporting instructors to adopt research-based instructional strategies that engage students intellectually, foster learning-supportive attitudes and habits of mind, and strengthen their persistence in mathematics. Yet the literature contains few well-rationalized models for faculty development in higher education. We describe the rationale and design for a model for discipline-based faculty development to support instructional change, and we detail our implementation of this model as applied to intensive workshops on inquiry-based learning (IBL) in college mathematics. These workshops seek to foster post-secondary mathematics instructors’ adoption of IBL, to help them adapt inquiry approaches for their classrooms, and ultimately to increase student learning and persistence in science and mathematics. Based on observed faculty needs, four strands of activity help instructors develop a mental model for an IBL classroom, adapt that model to their teaching context, develop facilitation and task-design skills, and plan an IBL mathematics course. Evaluation data from surveys and observations illustrate participant responses to the workshop and its components. The model has been robust across 15 years of workshops implemented by three generations of workshop leaders and its features make it adaptive, strategic, and practical for other faculty developers. 

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2. Inquiry-based learning in gateway mathematics: Its roots, status, and promise

   Foley, Gregory D; Heacock, Kayla (February 2025, MathAMATYC educator)

   Debrecht, Johanna; Alexander, George; Nabb, Keith (Ed.)

   Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is a form of active learning that engages students in cognitively demanding tasks—involving students’ attention, reasoning, problem solving, and communication. In the rest of this article, we look at IBL—past, present, and future. IBL has a storied history and a growing literature of theory and research to support its efficacy as a method for teaching for entry-level postsecondary (i.e., gateway) courses in mathematics. The 20th-century roots of teaching mathematics via IBL built a foundation for recent theory-building and for research that demonstrates how IBL teaching improves students’ mathematical proficiency, their ownership of and confidence in their own thinking and reasoning, their level of classroom engagement, and their success in mathematics class and throughout their lives. Despite this positive evidence, the mathematics teaching community faces challenges in implementing IBL in the classroom. Thus, we provide practical information on overcoming obstacles to IBL teaching, examples of IBL tasks, and tips for implementing IBL instruction. With the backing of AMATYC, its sister organizations—the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics—and the growing number of IBL practitioners and researchers, the future for IBL seems bright. 

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3. Increasing Student Success in Developmental Mathematics: Proceedings of a Workshop

   National Academies of Sciences, Engineering (January 2019, Publications listing National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering Institute of Medicine National Research Council)

   null (Ed.)

   The Board on Science Education and the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened the Workshop on Increasing Student Success in Developmental Mathematics on March 18-19, 2019. The Workshop explored how to best support all students in postsecondary mathematics, with particular attention to students who are unsuccessful in developmental mathematics and with an eye toward issues of access to promising reforms and equitable learning environments. The two-day workshop was designed to bring together a variety of stakeholders, including experts who have developed and/or implemented new initiatives to improve the mathematics education experience for students. The overarching goal of the workshop was to take stock of the mathematics education community's progress in this domain. Participants examined the data on students who are well-served by new reform structures in developmental mathematics and discussed various cohorts of students who are not currently well served - those who even with access to reforms do not succeed and those who do not have access to a reform due to differential access constraints. Throughout the workshop, participants also explored promising approaches to bolstering student outcomes in mathematics, focusing especially on research and data that demonstrate the success of these approaches; deliberated and discussed barriers and opportunities for effectively serving all students; and outlined some key directions of inquiry intended to address the prevailing research and data needs in the field. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop. 

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4. Drawing on three fields of education research to frame the development of digital games for inquiry-oriented linear algebra.

   Zandieh, M.; Plaxco, D.; Williams-Pierce, C.; Amresh, A. (January 2018, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Demands in undergraduate education are shifting to reach larger student populations - especially learners beyond the brick-and-mortar classroom - which has led to more pressing demands to incorporate technologies that afford such learners access to high-quality, research- based, digital instructional materials. In this article, we explore three theoretical perspectives that inform the development of such instructional materials. In our team’s efforts to develop a game-based learning applet for an existing inquiry-oriented curriculum, we have sought to theoretically frame our approach so that we can draw on the corpus of researcher knowledge from multiple disciplines. Accordingly, we will discuss three bodies of literature – realistic mathematics education’s [RME’s] approach to curriculum development, inquiry-oriented instruction and inquiry-based learning [IO/IBL], and game-based learning [GBL] - and draw on parallels across the three in order to form a coherent approach to developing digital games that draw on expertise in each field. 

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5. “Let’s See” – Students Play Vector Unknown, An Inquiry-Oriented Linear Algebra Digital Game

   Mauntel, M.; Sipes, J.; Zandieh, M.; Plaxco, D.; & Levine, B. (January 2019, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   The results we report are a product of the first iteration of a design-based study that uses a game, Vector Unknown, to support students in learning about vector equations in both algebraic and geometric contexts. While playing the game, students employed various numeric and geometric strategies that reflect differing levels of mathematical sophistication. Additionally, results indicate that students developed connections between the algebraic and geometric contexts during gameplay. The game’s design was a collaborative effort between mathematics educators and computer scientists and was based on a framework that integrates inquiry-oriented instruction and inquiry-based learning (IO/IBL), game-based learning (GBL), realistic mathematics education (RME). 

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