Collaborative Research: PreTeXt-Runestone: Open Textbooks Engaging Undergraduates in STEM (PROTEUS)

The project seeks to answer the following questions: How do groups of textbook users (students, teachers, authors, and researchers) work together to write interactive questions designed to elicit multiple ways of students’ thinking in classrooms? and How do students and instructors use those interactive questions embedded in their textbooks? The interactive questions are (i) short answer free response, (ii) matching exercises, and (iii) Parsons problems, and they will be embedded in textbooks for calculus and linear algebra  that vary in their support for active teaching, use of visualizations, and emphasis on proof. The question-development process involves all stakeholders: students (who have taken the courses), teachers (with experience teaching the courses), authors of the textbooks, and researchers. The project team will use a design-based research process with rapid cycles of question development over the summer and use of textbooks in actual classrooms over the academic year, collecting feedback from users (teachers and students) in laboratory and naturalistic settings to refine the questions. In Year 1, the interactive questions are tested in the classrooms of the eight instructors that participate in the development of the questions; in Year 2, the questions will be tested by 24 teachers from different types of institutions and contexts (e.g., public and private schools with a range of selectivity, including some with high minority designations). In Year 3 there will be an open invitation to institutions and instructors to use the textbooks.