Bob Pelayo has recently been PI or Co-PI on three successful grant proposals. He's the lead PI on BioCalculus Preparation, Engagement, and Application (BioCalc PEA) Program ($1.4M.) He's a Co-PI, with lead PI Babak Shahbaba in UCI’s Statistics & Computer Science departments, on Data Science Corps Funding for Internships & New Curricula ($1.5M) and as Co-PI with Alessandra Pantano on Teacher Noticing for Intro to Proof Courses ($300,000).
BioCalculus Preparation, Engagement, and Application (BioCalc PEA)
Program
This $1.4M grant, funded by the California Learning Lab, will re-imagine
the BioCalculus course sequences at three partnering universities: UC
Irvine, CSU Fullerton, and Fresno State. Led by UC Irvine and with Bob
Pelayo serving as Principal Investigator, this three-campus partnership
serves to tackle the problem of content disconnect between these
Calculus courses and Biology content/coursework. The main deliverable
will be a complete course package for active learning engagement in the
BioCalculus course sequence, which will be freely available to students.
Furthermore, preparation programs like a summer academy and first-year
experiences will develop porto-calculus skills with roots in biological
settings. Lastly, applications in upper-division Biology courses will be
developed to utilize Calculus skills in the domain field. More info can
be found at: https://ps.uci.edu/news/2424.
Data Science Corps Funding for Internships & New Curricula
This $1.5M National Science Foundation grant will provide internship
opportunities, workforce training, and curricular development at three
partnering campuses: UC Irvine, CSU Fullerton, and Cypress College.
This program is spearheaded by Dr. Babak Shahbaba in UCI’s Statistics
& Computer Science departments and has Bob Pelayo as Co-Principal
Investigator. At UCI, this grant will fund several Data Science Fellow
positions, which will provide workforce skill training, connections to
employment opportunities, and summer internships. Furthermore, several
new Data Science courses will be developed at the three universities,
including a Machine Learning course housed within the UCI Mathematics
department. More info can be found at: https://ps.uci.edu/news/2476
Teacher Noticing for Intro to Proof Courses
The $300,000 NSF grant, entitled Noticing in Mathematics for Student
Success (NiMS^2) will investigate the efficacy of teacher noticing in UC
Irvine’s Math 13 (Intro to Abstract Math) course. This course is
spearheaded by Dr. Rossella Santagata of UCI’s School of Education,
with Alessandra Pantano and Bob Pelayo serving as Co-PIs.
Traditionally, these intro to proof courses are difficult transition
periods for math majors, with students uncomfortable with the shift from
computational math to proof-based math. This grant will study the use
of teacher noticing, a video-annotation curriculum technique that allows
for more responsive teaching practices. Instructional teams
(instructors, graduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate learning
assistants) will be trained in this pedagogical practice and will
collect data after its implementation. Furthermore, the grant will
produce an active-based learning curriculum for UCI Math’s Math 13
course that will be freely available to students. For more information,
see: http://education.uci.edu/santagata_nsf.html