PROCEEDINGS OF THE 22ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2019
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Leadership and commitment to educational innovation: Comparing two cases of active learning reforms
Page: 680
Several studies have shown that student-centered instruction can help improve student success and persistence in STEM-related fields (e.g., Freeman et al., 2014). Despite this, institutional change can be difficult to enact. Accordingly, it is important to understand how departments both initiate and sustain meaningful change. For this paper we use interview data collected in Spring 2017 to examine how institutional and departmental factors affected reform efforts at two different institutions. In particular, we compare how two universities’ leadership and commitment to educational innovation contribute to the initiation, implementation, and sustainability of active learning in the undergraduate calculus sequence (Precalculus through Calculus 2).