A collaboration among educators, engineers, and mathematicians in three universities, the proposed project will create, implement, and evaluate a new, one-year curriculum and textbook for teaching a non-calculus, fourth year, high school mathematics course and accompanied assessment instruments. The curriculum will draw on decision-making tools that include but go well beyond linear programming, to enhance student mathematical competence (particularly solving multi-step problems), improve students' attitudes toward mathematics, and promote states' adoption of the curriculum (initially NC and MI). The first semester of the curriculum will focus on deterministic decision models and the second semester on probabilistic decision models. Corresponding materials and professional development experiences for teachers, including a one-semester university course, will be produced and field-tested, so that a support community is created and sustained. The core assumption for producing the new curriculum is that students are likely to be motivated and successful in learning mathematics via solving problems of relevance and interest to them here and now - not in some remote future. The team will select problem situations/contexts that are conducive to attracting females and underrepresented groups into mathematics and related fields, such as running a T-shirt business, choosing a deductible on collision insurance, and selecting a college or a used car. To assist teachers who implement the curriculum, a web-based teacher support infrastructure will be created, alongside a 'Rapid Response Traveling Help Team' that will provide onsite assistance as needed. Using pre- and post-treatment instruments, an external evaluator will analyze the impact of the new curriculum on student outcomes in a total of 50 experimental and 50 control classrooms in both states (about 3,000 students in all). These classrooms will be selected, stratified, and data of student outcomes analyzed based on socio-economic and underrepresented groups. Seven dissemination strategies will be utilized, including securing a contract with Key Curriculum Press by Year 3, and publishing the textbook and submitting it for adoption to the state-relevant decision-making bodies by Year 5.
Project MINDSET combined university expertise from Education, Engineering, and Mathematics to improve mathematics learning, motivate students to study mathematics, and improve their attitude toward mathematics. The project showed students how to use mathematics to solve problems they encounter in daily life (real-world) and removed the abstractness from mathematics by moving it into the realm of students’ own experiences (relevance). MINDSET is a mathematical-based toolset useful in either college or vocational education. Through extensive evaluation, the curriculum’s benefits have been validated, allowing relevant disciplines to use it in a variety of educational settings. MINDSET is the first mathematics curriculum to be developed with national support from multiple university Engineering and Operations Research departments and their respective professional societies. Mathematical-based decision-making tools are used routinely in production, manufacturing, healthcare, banking, government agencies, insurance and food industries, in theoretical and applied science disciplines, and in all Engineering disciplines. Most are non-calculus based and build on a foundation of Algebra, probability and statistics. By grounding mathematics in decision contexts familiar to students, we changed the mindset of students, stimulating them to see the relevance of mathematics to their lives and careers. Skilled in using tools that are common to scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians, students will enter the workforce better prepared to be creative employees. By enhancing students’ multi-step math problem-solving skills, MINDSET helped the transition into college Mathematics and Engineering. For those not headed into STEM degrees, industry will be able to hire more effectively trained employees with less need for on-the-job training. Further, Industrial Engineering departments enroll significantly more students from underrepresented groups (URG) than all of Engineering. Anecdotally, the applicability of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research tools to non-traditional engineering systems appears to be of interest to students from URG and this was validated by the MINDSET project. We believe there is strong potential to engage and encourage high school students from URG to pursue STEM careers by teaching decision-making math skills tools through MINDSET. Specifically, Project MINDSET (Mathematics Instruction using Decision Science and Engineering Tools) addressed Grand Challenge 3: Cutting-Edge STEM Content in K-12 Classrooms, and had three primary goals: Enhancement of students' mathematical ability, especially the formulation and solution of multi-step problems and interpretation of the results Improvement in students’ attitude toward mathematics, thereby motivating them to study mathematics, with attention to underrepresented groups, and Adoption of this new fourth-year math curriculum by multiple states. MINDSET had two major development activities and four objectives. Tools for Instruction of K-12 Students. Objective 1: Develop a new one-year high school curriculum and textbook in mathematics using mathematics-based decision-making tools to teach standard content. Objective 2: Through a multi-state, multi-school district assessment, show statistically significant improvement in students' mathematical ability, particularly in multi-step problem solving and interpretation of results, and in motivation and attitude toward mathematics. Tools for Instruction of K-12 Teachers. Objective 3: Develop an infrastructure to effectively educate and support teachers who will teach the curriculum. Objective 4: Demonstrate that this infrastructure is sustainable and sufficiently flexible that it can be successfully reproduced and utilized by others. Significant Results The MINDSET curriculum has been formally adopted by two states, North Carolina and Georgia. The MINDSET curriculum has been formally accepted by university systems as meeting their admission requirements for mathematics, The University of California System and The University of Georgia. In addition, the curriculum is under review by The University of North Carolina System. Statistical analyses indicated that for all students there was improvement in only one factor of multistep problem solving indicating there was only slight improvement in students' ability to solve multistep problems and interpret results. Statistical analyses indicated the MINDSET students scored statistically significantly higher on the Mathematics Attitude Survey than did the Comparison students which supports the major objective of the MINDSET project with regard to students’ attitudes toward mathematics. Additional Results MINDSET has provided professional development in its curriculum material for 330; 195 teachers in North Carolina, 100 from Michigan, 33 from Georgia, 1 from California and 1 from Indiana. MINDSET developed a Teacher Support Website (www.mindsetproject.org) with quizzes, exams, homework problems, projects, chapter material, and a Ning-based teacher social media system for teachers to share material, ideas and results. The website includes a help hotline that logs requests for help and routes them to project personnel to be answered.
