9604981 Wallace This project will document the process by which interdisciplinary mathematics and science courses are collaboratively created and taught at the undergraduate level. Dartmouth College is now beginning the second year of a five-year, NSF-funded "Mathematics Across the Curriculum" project which involves fifty faculty in the creation of over twenty new and revised courses. In one way or another, all involve the application of mathematics to problems outside its traditional academic domain; almost all involve the collaboration of a team of faculty in the design and teaching of the course. Although educational research suggests that integrating content across disciplines enhances retention and transfer of material and improves higher-order thinking skills, little information is available about how this is best accomplished at the college level. This study aims to give college faculty information that will help them do collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching and do it well. The investigation poses four questions: _How do collaborating professors face two major challenges that make integrating mathematics seem especially problematic: coordinating mathematical sequences with those of other subjects and allaying students' apprehensions about mathematics? _What does the process of collaboratively developing and teaching an interdisciplinary course look like as an intellectual and sociological experience, from beginning to end? _ How are various collaborative strategies linked with student outcomes? _ How do professors themselves characterize their experience? The research "triangulates" data from faculty interviews, ethnographic observation. and student interviews and records to answer these questions. A semi-structured interview will be conducted with each professor individually before and after the planning and teaching of each interdisciplinary course. These recorded interviews will explore their experiences, motivations, and goals in teaching these courses and their assessme nts of the results for themselves and their students. The ethnographer will also observe and take notes on planning sessions and other group meetings. These data should yield practical information about special issues encountered in integrating mathematics content, in working with colleagues from other disciplines, in addressing student responses to novel pedagogy, and in working within the established institutional organization. The interviews will also illuminate the subjective experiences of initiating this kind of reform. Data about student learning in these courses (available from pre- and post-tests, student interviews, and academic records collected in the already-funded evaluation of the MATC project) will be linked to information from faculty interviews and to results of weekly classroom observations of each MATC course. These linkages will be explored to draw conclusions about what pedagogical approaches seem most effective in improving mathematics and science learning. Administrators and college faculty outside the MATC will also be interviewed to document the cultural milieu within which reform of mathematics teaching takes place. By probing attitudes about mathematics and science of those outside its precincts and analyzing institutional organization, this study will explore the implications of college culture for interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching, and vice versa. This project thus will provide two kinds of information professors need: (1) practical information about problems encountered and solutions devised and (2) a "sense of the experience," a preview of what interdisciplinary teaching involves in personal as well as intellectual terms. The examination of university culture_focusing on the belief system about mathematics and on the institutional organization_addpesses reform issues on another level by placing mathematics reform in context and identifying factors that inhibit or promote reform efforts. The results of this research will be published widely in journal ar ticles in mathematics and education journals, through presentations at meetings, workshops and institutes, and in the form of a short, readable "how-to" manual to accompany the shelf of paperbacks produced from MATC courses.
