By Erin Moss, Co-Editor, DUE Point, Millersville University

The Makerspace-Guided Equitable Student Success in Developmental Mathematics project (MGESS) is an exploratory three-year project at Portland Community college (PCC) aimed at identifying mechanisms to improve success of underrepresented students in STEM. The MGESS project operates in the context of a makerspace, a community workspace that allows people to build, explore, and create, while sharing material resources and knowledge. The project team is taking a multi-faceted approach: establishing a remote boat-building class; creating trauma-informed math curricula; developing a training model for incorporating makerspace practices and a student-driven learning approach into existing math courses; and developing assessment tools to measure the impact of instructional practices on students’ sense of belonging and mathematics identity. Below, Principal Investigator Professor Julia Betts describes the project in greater detail and the ways the team adjusted their initial ideas to meet the realities of the pandemic.

Part of your project involved designing an inquiry-based co-curricular course that aligns developmental mathematics content with activities related to building a wooden boat. What mathematics concepts and skills are you able to address in this context?

By constructing a miniature rowboat, students were exposed to topics like unit conversions, fractions, and basic algebraic equations. Students were guided through the process of determining and applying scale factors to translate blueprints of their boat design and better understand how to extrapolate a 3-dimensional object from 2-dimensional drawings. For many students, engaging in conversations about the use of a ruler and manipulating fractions gave them the opportunity to directly apply prior knowledge and experiences outside the math classroom.

Other key ideas of tolerance, accuracy, and precision arose from students’ measurements and physical manipulation of the materials. Each student’s boat was rendered unique based on their decisions about rounding, cutting, and sanding. In this regard, each student took their own approach to address the same problem, allowing us to talk as a group about the value of multiple paths to arrive at the same solution. 

Beyond the specific mathematics competencies mentioned above, what else do you hope students learn from their experiences working in the makerspace?

While math competencies are important to our own work and to students’ success in their mathematics journey at the post-secondary level, crucial developments occurred in students’ confidence in taking risks when encountering math. For many students, traditional math classes have been an ongoing hurdle in their pursuit of a degree, and a lack of confidence in such spaces has contributed to real challenges. In our class, we utilize trauma-informed practices, navigating the impact that issues of confidence have on learning in particular and focusing on ways to build self-efficacy. For instance, students worked in small groups to collaborate in discussions around their personal learning styles and apprehensions, as well as on the assembly of their boats. They were accompanied by Peer Facilitators, current and former PCC students that could model vulnerability and uncertainty as a means of supporting richer discussions and participation.

How do you expect that participation in the inquiry-based co-curricular course might benefit students who are underrepresented in STEM?

At PCC, we encounter a large proportion of underrepresented students that struggle to find success in pre-college math courses. Many students participating in our experimental course had retaken the same classes several times and never felt successful with the traditional pedagogical approach. By providing a lower stakes space for learning that acknowledges persistent systemic barriers, students have the opportunity to build a foundation of core mathematical concepts in alignment with their own diverse learning needs that they can carry with them on their academic journey.

Our hope is that we can take what we’ve learned in terms of creating a more inclusive, transparent dialogue around math and engage our faculty in integrating this approach into existing classrooms. That way all students—especially those that haven’t seen themselves as math learners previously—can be more included in the learning process. Through April 2022, current math faculty can participate in a series of trainings around the teaching practices that we found most valuable. In these sessions, we highlight strategies to incorporate makerspace culture—and social connection in general—into math coursework. Faculty from other universities are welcome to participate; just contact our team at MGESS@pcc.edu! Sample trainings led by our math faculty include:

• Improving Real Life Applications

• Rethinking “Irritating” Students

• Building Community and Social Connection

Complex projects and research seldom go exactly as planned. Tell us about a challenge that you have faced and how you were able to overcome it.

We received this grant in January 2020, and the intention was to launch a hands-on, in-person course in Fall 2020 in which we would build an 11-foot boat in our STEM Center on campus. But with our campus closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we were left reeling from the global implications of a pandemic and had to think creatively about how we could execute a hands-on project remotely. Our team developed processes that included direct recruitment of students virtually and the creation of model kits for miniature boats that could be mailed to students. We developed curriculum and methods to hold space for thoughtful conversations in Zoom break-out rooms, stretched our own comforts around new communication tools and their shortcomings, and tested our own creativity in terms of navigating the troubleshooting that comes with supporting a hands-on activity from afar. What has surprised me most about it all is how creative we really could be under the circumstances. We put our own ethos of “thoughtful risk-taking”, “collaboration”, and “critical thinking” from our makerspace into this work.

Learn more about NSF DUE 1939890

Full Project Name: Makerspace-Guided Equitable Student Success in Developmental Mathematics

Abstract: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939890&HistoricalAwards=false

Project Contact: Professor Julia Betts, PI; julia.betts@pcc.edu

*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.