The SUMMIT-P Project: Transforming Undergraduate Mathematics Education to Support Partner Disciplines

The National Consortium for Synergistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships or the SUMMIT-P project was funded in 2017 by the National Science Foundation. SUMMIT-P was established to refresh lower division undergraduate mathematics courses. It has built upon the work of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Curriculum Foundations (CF) project which published 22 reports on the findings gathered from various disciplines on the mathematics topics students need to master to be successful in their respective fields of study. The consortium has more than 50 team members across approximately 20 disciplines and from 15 institutions. The goals of the consortium are to • implement major recommendations from the MAA CF project for the purpose of broadening participation in and institutional capacity for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially relative to teaching and learning in undergraduate mathematics courses; • foster a network of faculty and programs in order to promote community and institutional transformation, through shared experiences and ideas for successfully creating functional interdisciplinary partnerships within and across institutions; • change the undergraduate mathematics curriculum in ways that support improved STEM learning for all students while building the STEM workforce of tomorrow; and, • monitor various aspects of the CF recommendations being implemented at participating institutions while measuring the impact on faculty and students. Because this collaborative approach for curriculum development is being implemented at a variety of institutions, each institution 1) uses locally appropriate strategies, 2) engages faculty from locally-selected partner disciplines, and 3) focuses on mathematics courses selected by that institution. The consortium holds regular virtual meetings of the institutional principal investigators and evaluation team. The project management team meets every three weeks to discuss progress and goals for the consortium while providing leadership and guidance to the institutional teams. In addition, virtual professional development opportunities are offered through SUMMIT-P webinars. The nine original SUMMIT-P institutions have implemented new or modified curricula for their affected courses and expanded on the pilot interventions conducted during first years of the grant. The consortium welcomed three new institutions in November 2019. To date, more than a dozen different lower level mathematics courses have been revised in which on average 6,000 students per year have been enrolled from 20 different partner disciplines. This paper provides an overview of the consortium, its activities, and results achieved thus far.