The Impact of COVID-19 on Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Education: Report on a CBMS Survey

Abstract

The first question on the survey was designed to get at departments’ choice of instructional delivery method under pandemic conditions. Figure 1 shows how various types of departments addressed class formats through the question, “Based on your current plans for the fall 2020 term, what The following report is a summary of results from a survey of undergraduate mathematical and statistical sciences programs in two-year and four-year institutions in the US about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected these programs, and what changes to future instruction might occur as a result of the experience. Administered on behalf of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) in October and November 2020 by the American Mathematical Society in conjunction with Westat, Inc., and with funding from the National Science Foundation, the survey consists of six multiple-choice questions, a request for enrollments, and two free response questions. The survey instrument is located at www.ams.org/profession /data/cbms-survey/cbms2020, where response data is also available, broken down by department type, highest degree offered, institutional size, and institutional control (public/private). The Appendix is also available at that site. In this report, the headings generally indicate takeaway messages from the responses, and they generally follow the sequence of the survey instrument questions. Within the headings, the discussion, figures, and tables The Impact of COVID-19 on Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Education: Report on a CBMS Survey