I have been interested in understanding student experience since I was a research assistant at Michigan State University working for NSF Grant No. 1835946. As part of this grant, we followed undergraduate students through their proof-based mathematics coursework. In the participants' first semester, they experienced many methods of group formation, and I led investigations on how students experienced these different group formation methods (Küchle et al., 2024).
During our time following the participants through their coursework, the coronavirus pandemic began. With the shift to online instruction, I also led investigations on students' online learning experiences (Küchle et al., 2023).
Currently, I am co-Principal Investigator on NSF Grant No. 2315747 ($399,680.00; 2024–2026) as part of which we are building a Merit Program at Auburn University, inspired by the Merit Program at the University of Illinois. As part of building and refining this program, we are in the process of investigating what stress Merit Program participants experience within the classroom. Furthermore, I am developing a teaching professional development (T-PD) for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) with previous teaching experience. The T-PD covers various aspects of active learning (e.g., rich mathematical tasks, group work) and is intended to prepare our GTAs to teach Merit recitations.
Küchle, V. A. B., Karunakaran, S. S., Levin, M., Smith, J. P., III, Castle, S., Hwang, J., Lu, Y., & Elmore, R. A. (2023). Collapsing spaces, colliding places: Leveraging constructs from humanistic geography to explore mathematics classes. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 13(1), 54–69. https://doi.org/10.5642/jhummath.LMPQ5945
Küchle, V. A. B., Smith III, J. P., Hwang, J., & Menon, R. (2024). How university mathematics instructors form groups and how students experience them. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2024.2369651