Project 1: Supporting Mathematical Instruction around Definitions through Values-Centered Collaboration
Faculty Mentor(s): Dr. Kristen Vroom (LBC) and Dr. Rachel Rupnow (NIU)
Term(s): Fall 2025 and Spring 2026
Maximum number of research positions: 1
Expected hours/week: ~45 hours per semester
Location: In-Person only (for Fall semester student must be available regularly in East Lansing on Monday/Wednesday/Friday at either 11:30-12:20 or 12:40-1:30)
Lecturing in undergraduate mathematics courses is the predominant form of instruction, likely because it meets instructors’ goals, including content coverage, preparing future mathematicians, precision and language, and efficiency. This NSF-funded project takes a novel approach to improving undergraduate instruction by centering mathematics instructors through collaboration to improve their lectures. We focus on teaching the norms and values of definitions, as definitions are fundamental across different undergraduate courses and have been identified as an area needing improvement. We strategically integrate focus groups, class observations, surveys, and interviews with instructors and students to develop a toolkit of instructional innovations for effectively communicating mathematical norms and values around definitions in a variety of undergraduate mathematics courses. The undergraduate research assistant will join our multi-institutional research team and support data collection by observing and recording class videos as well as organizing data.
Project specific qualifications or preferences: Slight preference to have interests in math and/or education but not necessary.
Project 2: The Physiology of Effective Teaching: How Do Instructors Become Expert Educators?
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Doherty
Term(s): Fall 2025 through Spring 2026
Maximum number of research positions: 1
Expected hours/week: 7 hours/week
Location: In-person only (student must be available regularly in East Lansing)
Position also posted on Handshake: Job 10204815
Have you ever noticed how some professors can take the most complex ideas and break them down in ways that just make sense? It’s not enough to know everything about the topic you teach, great educators also have to know how to effectively teach these tricky topics! This type of knowledge is called pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and is developed with experience. In this project, we will investigate what PCK physiology instructors have. We will work together to qualitatively analyze the knowledge instructors have and use to effectively teach the core concept of flow down gradients, also known as flux, from interviews with faculty across the country. For our project, we’ll be looking at instructors’ PCK of two types of flux in physiology: (1) diffusion and (2) bulk flow. This work will involve reading the literature to find out what has been previously described by other education researchers, analyzing interviews and presenting our findings to the broader research community.
Project specific qualifications or preferences: Completion of LB 145 (or BioSci equivalent) required. Physiology coursework preferred.
Project 3: Seeing the Signaling: Investigating Students' Ion Flux Reasoning With Visual Representations
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Doherty
Term(s): Fall 2025 through Spring 2026
Maximum number of research positions: 1
Expected hours/week: 7 hours/week
Location: In-person only (student must be available regularly in East Lansing)
Position also posted on Handshake: Job 10204904
To newcomers, neuroscience graphs may look like colorful chaos-spikes, waves, gradients-but for students learning electrophysiology, they tell stories of where, how, and why ions move. Interpreting and analyzing representations like this are important scientific skills that students develop and refine throughout their undergraduate careers. In neuroscience, students are often presented with complex visual representations (e.g., action potential traces, current-voltage graphs, and calcium signaling heatmaps) that they must make sense of to understand what ions are doing at any given moment. To accurately interpret these representations, students must bring together their scientific skills and their understanding of electrophysiology concepts. This research project focuses on investigating how undergraduate neuroscience students do just that: how do they coordinate these two knowledge bases to interpret and reason with different visual representations of ion flux? Using interview data, we will work together to identify different patterns in the coordination of their content and scientific skills. This work will involve reading the literature to find out what is already known about this topic, assisting in the collection and preparation of interview data, analyzing interview data, and presenting our findings to the broader research community.
Project specific qualifications or preferences: An understanding of the Nernst equation is required. Completion of LB145 (or BioSci equivalent) preferred.