University Awarded $156,380 for Mathematics, Business Collaboration
Saint Louis University has been awarded $156,380 over five years as part of a $2.6 million National Science Foundation grant to fund the project Collaborative Research: A National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships (SUMMIT-P).
The project is led by Susan Ganter, Ph.D., at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Eleven colleges and universities, including SLU, will form a consortium to renew the lower division undergraduate mathematics curriculum based on research about the needs of partner disciplines. The project studies the role of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional faculty learning communities in building collaborations for meaningful curricular change.
At each institution, mathematics and partner discipline faculty will collaborate to
understand recommendations from the (prior) Curriculum Foundations (CF) project, determine
how these recommendations can be used to effectively improve the content of affected
courses, introduce modifications in pilot sections, work with a central evaluation
team to measure the effectiveness of new approaches especially as pertains to students
from underrepresented groups, offer workshops and support for instructors using these
new curricula (locally, regionally and nationally), and scale-up these new offerings
within the consortium and through dissemination to additional campuses.
The SLU team, headed by associate professor Mike May, S.J., will focus on making
mathematics instruction more effective for business students. It will build on previous
work that revised the survey of calculus course taken by many business students to
bring it in line with previous Curriculum Foundations recommendations. The SLU team
includes May, Anneke Bart, Ph.D., and Michael Alderson, Ph.D. The team will run a
seminar made up of mathematics and business faculty that will look at how to adjust
courses in both disciplines to provide more effective integration of the disciplines
in the students' minds.
"The grant puts SLU in a consortium of schools across the country that are interested in enacting the kinds of change we have already done with survey of calculus, and will provide input to what we would like to do with other courses for business students," May said. "The grant is a continuation of the curriculum foundations project, which inspired the work we have been doing here for a number of years."
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1625519. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.