Meeting Abstract
We will present our experiences teaching in consecutive years of an upper-division undergraduate class in mathematical modeling at UNC Chapel Hill where these small-group activities formed a large part of the students’ final grades. These assignments focused on a specific type of active learning that increases student engagement by having students take on the role of participant-scientist in structured, small-group activities. By inhabiting this role, students can experience many aspects of research in interdisciplinary fields including generating and testing hypotheses, evaluating model assumptions, communicating research through writing and oral presentation, and anonymous peer review. Additionally, the intentional structuring of interdisciplinary groups mimicked the type of working conditions that students will eventually face outside university, in which their expertise is unique and deep compared to their colleagues, and is unlike the conditions posed by single-major lecture and lab activities. We believe that this method of building small, interdisciplinary working groups to solve structured problems is widely applicable to interdisciplinary classroom teaching.
