| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 15, 2012 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 15, 2012 |
| Award Number: | 1226081 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
John Haddock
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2012 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2016 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $162,303.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $162,303.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
660 S MILL AVENUE STE 204 TEMPE AZ US 85281-3670 (480)965-5479 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
P.O. Box 876011 Tempe AZ US 85287-6011 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | TUES-Type 2 Project |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This project proposes to make significant improvements to WeBWorK's NPL, and build a community of faculty around the country to maintain and curate the future role of the NPL (National Public Library), which is a collection of over 25,000 homework problems that are distributed with WeBWorK. WeBWorK, a web-based homework system used by over 300 schools, is an open-source system, developed and maintained by mathematicians. It is supported by the Mathematics Association of America (MAA). Additional outcomes of the project are improving the organization of NPL problems and developing software tools to facilitate easy access to the NPL. Upon completion, mathematics instructors will be able to search the library more easily for problems of the type they want. Both the NPL and the accompanying software promote the improvement of teaching and enhance the infrastructure for education in mathematics. Moreover, the project fosters mathematics faculty development by making a new tool accessible for effective mathematics teaching.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
WeBWorK is a free, open-source, web-based homework system designed for mathematics. Students enter answers in the form they might in traditional homework. In particular, answers are not limited to multiple choice, true/false, and the like, but can include functions, equations, sets, etc. The system generates a similar, but different version of each question for each student. To accomplish this, each problem is essentially a little computer program which can produce different versions of a question and still check student answers correctly. As a result, the problems have to be specially written for the system.
The Open Problem Library (OPL), is a collection of problems which are free, open-source, and written for WeBWorK. After its initial creation a decade ago, so many problems were contributed to it that it became very hard for teachers to find problems in it. The main goal of this project was to address this problem by reorganizing the problems according to a new math-based taxonomy, rate problems for their difficulty levels, and group similar problems together to streamline the search process. This is time-intensive work, and so we ran a series of seven workshops where faculty from around the country met to work on this revision and reorganization of the OPL.
The project was successful on all counts. Faculty collaborated to create a new taxonomy for the problems with three levels of searching, dealt with over 41,000 problems deciding to accept or reject problems. Those which were accepted were rated for difficulty, classified, and if appropriate, put into cohorts of similar problems. Software was written and incorporated into WeBWorK to accommodate the changes and improve the experience of teachers searching for problems from within WeBWorK. Finally, infrastructure was put in place to facilitate processing of the submission of new problems to the OPL, and an OPL editorial board was created to review submissions and to curate the OPL going forward.
Using a web-based homework system for checking math homework is now a fact of life for many thousands of students every semester. WeBWorK provides a free high-quality platform for administering this homework, and this project will help teachers do a better job in finding homework questions they want to assign for their courses.
Last Modified: 09/13/2016
Modified by: John W Jones
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