
NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | August 27, 2018 |
Latest Amendment Date: | March 30, 2022 |
Award Number: | 1821706 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Patrice Waller
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
Start Date: | October 1, 2018 |
End Date: | September 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,013,936.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,113,928.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2022 = $99,992.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
CALTECH, 1200 E CALIFORNIA BLVD PASADENA CA US 91125-0001 (408)350-2088 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
CA US 95112-1006 |
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): | IUSE |
Primary Program Source: |
04001819DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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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 Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Development and Implementation project aims to address challenges in the undergraduate STEM curriculum, particularly the need to promote student learning and the development of mathematical and computational skills. Specifically, this project focuses on open source mathematics textbooks that are available in free online versions. It seeks to understand two interrelated questions: "How do instructors and students use textbooks?" and "How can we develop textbooks that better support teaching and learning?" To answer these questions, the project will complete a comprehensive educational research study that includes gathering data from multiple classrooms in a variety of settings, and subsequent analysis of that data. The development portion of the project will focus on PreTeXt, a publishing system designed to encourage the creation of free, open source textbooks. The project will examine the use of existing books created with PreTeXt, and from these observations further develop the PreTeXt platform, so that open source textbooks can have increased effectiveness. The integration of research and development activities is designed to create a continuous cycle of innovation between the research and development activities.
The education research component of this project will study 49 courses taught at two-year colleges, and four-year colleges and universities. These courses include first-year calculus, second-year linear algebra, and upper-division abstract algebra. The research study will investigate the work of instructors in planning and teaching lessons drawn from an online textbook and the work of students as they use the same textbooks to learn the material. In addition, the study will contrast such work with the work that instructors and students do when using less dynamic resources, e.g., a PDF or bound copy of the same material. PreTeXt is a new authoring platform that enables authors to easily fashion a textbook for both print (static) and online (dynamic) formats, including both computational and interactive components in the online version. The project will continue the development of PreTeXt and the technical underpinnings to create high quality online versions of textbooks, while only requiring authors to concentrate on their content. The accessibility features for readers with disabilities will be further improved. The inherent technical structure of online PreTeXt books will allow automated collection of student textbook usage data, organized by individual reader, with resolution to the minute and at the level of individual components, such as viewing a video. This interplay between research and development activities will produce large amounts of high-quality data about students' use of their textbooks. The Open Textbook Initiative at the American Institute of Mathematics will continue and expand its leadership in vetting and recommending quality free and low-cost textbooks, and help other STEM disciplines to adopt its successful evaluation criteria. Workshops for instructors, authors, and software developers will blend dissemination, professional development, editorial review, and software development. A novel feature of these workshops will be teaching test-site instructors how to contribute to the improvement of the open source textbooks that they are using in their courses.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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.
UTMOST studies how undergraduate students use online interactive mathematics textbooks, as created by authors using PreTeXt software.
* Educational Research Study
We found that it is possible to categorize students’ responses according to the conception model by Balacheff, to identify the ways in which students control their work: how they know they have found an answer and that the answer is correct.
We identified three different control structures in the textbooks and over nine different in the student responses.
We were able to differentiate student actions based on the goals they have and the textbooks they use and to identify the textbook elements associated with those actions.
An educational research workshop was held June 2022 (Ann Arbor) as the global pandemic eased.
* Development of PreTeXt, Mathematics Textbook Publishing Software
PreTeXt has successfully merged with Runestone, a similar project designed around HTML textbooks for computer science. This has given Runestone a new language for authoring, and multiple new output formats. PreTeXt has gained dedicated free hosting, a basic Learning Management System, and a Learning Engineering Analytics Portal (LEAP) providing even better tools for educational research experiments.
There has been continued development of the PreTeXt-CLI for ease-of-use. Numerous new features and improvements have been made to existing features.
At least 46 textbooks were converted from LaTeX to PreTeXt, for use as open textbooks.
Developers' workshops were held June 2021 (Portland) and May 2025 (Tacoma). Workshops planned for early in the pandemic moved to regular online sessions.
* Supplement for Automated Conversion of PreTeXt Books to Braille
A complete rewrite of the conversion of PreTeXt to braille, an experimental rendering of TikZ graphics for blind readers (audio and tactile), initiation of the PreFigure project to make quality diagrams for both sighted and blind readers. We broadened our testing to more books and more blind readers.
* AIM Open Textbook Initiative
The Open Textbook Initiative met regularly (about eight times a year) and has reviewed dozens of open textbooks. About half of these are included on their review list. Preparations were made to transfer leadership from PI Morrison to David Austin.
* Dissemination
More that ten academic papers have been published on the educational research. Numerous papers, conference proceedings, and other publications have described PreTeXt. Four websites describe various activities of the project.
* Broader Impacts
PreTeXt is openly-licensed software. Most authors use it to create open textbooks (available for free online). So there is a significant reduction in the cost of a student's education. Findings from the educational research study contribute to our understanding of how students learn, and feed back into making PreTeXt books more effective.
Last Modified: 05/13/2025
Modified by: Robert Beezer
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