Inquiry-based learning has been a prominent component in education since the days of Socrates. In more recent times, one of the strongest proponents of this type of learning has been R.L. Moore. In his approach, Moore provided the students with a bare outline of the essentials of some mathematical topic, and the students were required to discover the major results in this topic using only their own creative thoughts. The students, having arrived at proofs of the main facts, would then present the results to their classmates and to Moore.
Present-day Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) includes less strict versions of Moore's techniques, which are in direct contrast to the traditional lecture method of instruction. The activities of this project are designed to accomplish several major goals related to IBL. Among these are the necessity to modify the teaching and learning of mathematics in such a way that students gain a deep understanding of the subject matter through their own participation in its discovery and presentation. The method of IBL changes the focus in the classroom from the instructor to the students. It has been found that students in IBL classes, in comparison with their peers in regular mathematics classes, have a deeper knowledge of mathematical structures and a stronger retention of mathematical concepts.
Included in this project is dissemination of IBL mathematics teaching through three summer workshops in different geographical locations. Participants from each workshop come from colleges and universities in the general geographical location of the host institution. The workshops expose the participants to the various components of effective IBL teaching of mathematics. The workshops include model classes, sessions on the creation of materials, film viewings, and presentations by the participants themselves in an IBL setting. As part of the follow-up, current IBL practitioners from the four participating universities establish regular contacts with the workshop participants, including visits to the individual departments. Through this follow-up, additional advice and counsel is provided by those who have already experienced success in IBL teaching. Detailed assessment of the project activities takes place at every stage so that each facet of the planned activities is subjected to careful scrutiny. This includes assessment of the effectiveness of IBL itself as well as the ability of the workshops to communicate to faculty the methods for conducting an IBL class. The ultimate goal is to improve mathematics education by having every undergraduate student experience at least one IBL mathematics class during her or his college career.
This collaborative project sought to provide hands-on, intensive workshops for college mathematics instructors interested in learning about and trying out inquiry-based learning (IBL) methods in college mathematics courses. Follow-up activities were intended to build a community among these faculty and current IBL users and to support their ongoing efforts at implementing IBL methods and improving their success. Our group’s role as the evaluation team was to examine the effectiveness of these faculty development and dissemination efforts and thereby contribute to a broader understanding of how best to expand college instructors’ uptake of research-based teaching strategies. Overall, the five workshops supported by this collaborative project served 187 participants (four were fully supported, and one jointly supported by another project). The results are overall quite positive. The workshop participants were diverse relative to mathematics faculty nationwide; the workshops generally used a variety of teaching approaches to help instructors understand IBL teaching and prepare to use it. The extent to which the workshops provided direct follow-up support was rather variable, but when it was provided, evidence show that it did enhance use of IBL activities. In particular, comparisons of pre-workshop to post-workshop surveys indicated improvements in participants’ self-reported views about IBL in four domains: knowledge of IBL, skills in IBL teaching, beliefs in the effectiveness of IBL, and motivation to use IBL. Together, these trends indicate that participants gained important knowledge and skills. While participants’ already-high motivation to use IBL did not rise over the long term, the post-workshop spike in motivation may have contributed to the high rate of uptake. Finally, these new gains of knowledge and skills were applied in undergraduate classrooms. At least 58% of workshop attendees from the first three workshops (2010-2012) reported implementing at least some IBL methods in the year following the workshop. The 2012 cohort had higher implementation rates that the others, perhaps due to time provided at the workshop for participants to prepare course materials, or to ongoing follow-up support provided through email mentoring. Some important feature of the workshops can be linked to instructor change and adoption of inquiry-based practices. Two of the most important features of successful workshops are that they provide (1) broad, inclusive definitions of IBL and examples of how it is applied in diverse settings and (2) ongoing follow-up support for participants. First, while prior research has suggested that when instructors adapt student-centered teaching materials or strategies, they often reduce the complexity of the originals and align them more with traditional, lecture-based instruction, our research indicates the opposite. That is, we found that providing broad definitions and examples helps to reduce the degree to which instructors need to adapt the approach, since they have already seen and considered how to do IBL in a variety of contexts, including contexts similar to their own. Second, fairly simple forms of ongoing follow-up support apparently helped to increase the degree of instructor uptake of IBL approaches. The 2012 workshop group email list was quite active in the year following the workshop, and participants used it to encourage each other and address common concerns as they began implementing IBL in their own classrooms. This group also had significantly higher rates of implementation than the other workshops. The follow-up approach used is rather low-tech, based on a traditional e-mail listserv (as e-mail is still the medium of choice for most faculty) with regular prompts by the workshop leaders to share their IBL teaching plans, successes and challenges. Our analysis of listserv participation by the 2012 workshop cohort shows that list traffic shifts over time to feature more collegial participation (and less leader intervention), which we believe reflects the development of trust and a sense of shared goals among the workshop cohort. Use of similar follow-up techniques in a related award provides an opportunity to pursue this initial observation in greater depth. The intellectual merit of this project stems from its rigorous evaluation of a fairly extensive faculty development effort to support the use of inquiry-based learning in college mathematics, a student-centered approach that is backed by evidence of positive impact on student achievement and attitudes. The evidence gathered in this study attests to the effectiveness of intensive workshops focused on a pedagogical approach that is broadly applicable to a range of courses, and provides some information about aspects of the workshops that contributed to their effectiveness. These findings will be broadly disseminated through a forthcoming journal article. The broader impact of the project lies in the fact that it reached nearly 200 faculty over five years with a workshop that supported the development of the knowledge and skills needed to teach with inquiry-based learning approaches. A high fraction of participating faculty did in fact apply IBL in their own classrooms, thus supporting the learning of thousands of college students nationwide.
