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 c...

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