The number of undergraduates placing into developmental or "remedial" coursework continues to increase. This rise is concerning because developmental or "remedial" coursework creates barriers for many students. This mixed method study examines a holistic approach to placement. After one-on-one interviews with mathematics…

This paper discusses several linear algebra activities designed to help enhance students' skills in collaborating, exploring mathematics, and linking together abstract and visual ways of approaching mathematics. Most of these activities are short, accessible, engaging, and easy to incorporate into any classroom. In addition, we discuss some…

This article describes the outcomes of a faculty partnership between a math professor and a composition professor to improve the final paper in a research-focused senior capstone math course. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the importance of undergraduate research experiences and how to best create and support such endeavors.…

Though posters have been used as a pedagogical tool in a variety of fields, the literature suggests that the use of posters as an educational assessment tool by the mathematics community has been limited. This is unfortunate given the numerous potential benefits of a poster, including the development of oral communication skills and the ability to…

Course coordination implies coordination in the design, structure, and teaching of a course to the extent that multiple instructors within a multi-section course have come to a common agreement. The course coordination model within our college's Department of Mathematics is described and discussed. The outcomes experienced as the department moved…

We present a model for professional development of instructional faculty. Though initially conceived for accreditation compliance as a credentialing process for adjunct faculty, this project led to increases in participants' collaboration on lesson design, investment in curricular decisions, and adoption of active learning methods. In this paper,…

We describe how one department moved from skepticism to wide-spread embrace of coordinated Calculus I. Data played a crucial role in this process. Details of this journey, including successful strategies and missteps, may provide insight and perspective to other departments starting on, or immersed in, similar transformational adventures.

In this work, we discuss the development of descriptive actions that facilitators take in semester-long online professional development geared at supporting instructional change at the undergraduate level. Current work in undergraduate mathematics education includes various large-scale projects aimed to support individuals or departments in…

In this paper, we invite the reader to think deeply about professional development opportunities for faculty. The focus of this professional development is to improve teaching and learning by including more inquiry in the mathematics classroom. Building on theories of teaching and learning, we develop the idea of "teaching procedures"…

In this paper, I highlight several facets of personnel issues that can arise during one's time as a mathematics department chair and recommend communication strategies to address them. The strategies involve situations with individual faculty members, general communication with faculty, and communication with the administration.

The manuscript describes a community-based mathematical modeling task that was implemented in a Calculus I classroom to engage students in mathematical modeling. Twenty-five undergraduate students engaged in this activity. These students selected a context that they found interesting, posed questions, developed constraints, came up with solution…

This article reports on a reconceptualization of the Precalculus course experience at Florida International University. We discuss the details of the redesign process--unified within a faculty learning community (FLC) model--along with a broader change in the course sequence leading up to Calculus. We provide data, including the comparison between…

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…

Collegiate mathematics instructors are moving away from traditional lecture-based teaching practices to accommodate the pedagogies that support more active student learning. As part of the movement, groupwork has been increasingly implemented. At the same time, mathematics classrooms have become increasingly diverse and also in the distribution of…

An important step to achieving a sustainable department culture that encourages innovation in teaching is the alleviation of the isolation that teaching faculty experience. Decreasing this isolation should be accomplished in a manner that respects all instructors' classroom practices while simultaneously exposing faculty to new ideas. In this…