Announcement Regarding White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Call to Action on Active Learning in STEM Education

Posted on August 31, 2016 by

By Benjamin Braun, Editor-in-Chief, University of Kentucky

This is an announcement to the mathematical community that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a Call to Action for incorporating Active Learning in K-12 and higher education STEM courses. Their call includes a submission form where they ask: “What new (i.e., not yet public) activities or actions is your organization undertaking to respond to the Call to Action to improve STEM teaching and learning through the use of active learning strategies?” The deadline for submission of responses is Sept 23, 2016.  It would be excellent for the mathematics community to be well-represented among the submissions, so I encourage our readers to submit their activities and to share this information with others.

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An Inclusive Maths Conference: ECCO 2016

Posted on August 22, 2016 by

By Viviane Pons, maitre de conferences (Assistant Professor), Université Paris-Sud

Editor’s Note: An expanded version of this article previously appeared at http://openpyviv.com/2016/07/12/ECCO/.

Being one of the few women in the men’s world of mathematics and computer science has led me to look around and spot our flaws when inclusivity is concerned. Let’s not fool ourselves: even though we think of us as being purely objective beyond bias, the maths world is not an inclusive paradise.  The academic world I personally live in is made of mostly white men, mostly from western countries (Europe, US, Canada, and just a little bit of Asia). If you look even closer, you’ll see that most of us come from well-off educated families. Except for the fact that I am a woman, I check all the other boxes myself and I am well-aware of it. Considering the multiple causes of this situation, what can be done? What can I do as a single individual in this world, when I’m busy fighting my own fights earning my right to stay around? Well, I’m not going to answer that just now, but I will share a very good experience I just had. I went to a CIMPA maths summer school in Colombia that was different: ECCO 2016. For the first time, I felt it was indeed inclusive in the best possible way. And, it was excellent maths too, so I was really happy.

First, a little bit of context.  As opposed to a classical conference where most presentations are short ones to announce new results, a summer school is usually made of mini-courses on a certain topic. At ECCO 2016, the main audience was made of students (masters students, PhD students, and undergrads) but some postdocs and even professors participated as well, as we are always keen on learning new things. It was in Colombia and the topic was combinatorics, which happens to be my field. ECCO runs every two years, and began in 2003 as a small event organized by Federico Ardila. He is a Colombian mathematician based in the US and we (the academic world) owe him thanks for many great researchers in combinatorics. I had noticed before that the number of Colombian people among researchers in combinatorics was astonishingly high, but before I met Federico I had no idea why. Most of this very active Colombian community is now organizing the conference. Over the years, ECCO has become quite a big event in combinatorics with a very positive, well-earned, reputation. This year, for the first time, it was a CIMPA school and there were over 100 participants.  So why was this conference so good?

IMG_6350_blog

Photo by Federico Ardila

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From the Editors: Changes for the Editorial Board

Posted on August 20, 2016 by

by Benjamin Braun, Editor-in-Chief, University of Kentucky

To start, I want to thank all of our readers, subscribers, and contributors — we appreciate your feedback and ideas through your writing, social media comments, and in-person conversations at mathematical meetings and events.  Since launching our blog in June of 2014, our articles have received over 189,000 unique page views!  We will continue to strive to provide high-quality articles on a broad range of topics related to post-secondary mathematics, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

I have a few changes to announce regarding the editorial board for On Teaching and Learning Mathematics.  Following two years of service as a founding Contributing Editor for our blog, Elise Lockwood is leaving our board to join the editorial board of the new International Journal on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (IJRUME).  Many thanks to Elise for her excellent contributions that helped the blog have a great start over the past two years!  I know that we can look forward to hearing more from Elise in the future as a contributing author.

For 2016-2017, I am happy to welcome three new Contributing Editors to the board:

  • Luis David García Puente, Sam Houston State University
  • Jess Ellis, Colorado State University
  • Steven Klee, Seattle University

Luis, Jess, and Steve bring with them a wealth of expertise in teaching, research, and mentoring, and I am excited that they will be sharing their expertise with our readers.

For those of you who are regular readers, we will continue to publish articles roughly every two weeks, with a target goal of publishing 24 articles per year. Our next post is scheduled for August 22, 2016, where we will hear from Viviane Pons about her experience at a math summer school that was “inclusive in the best possible way.” Stay tuned!

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Does the Calculus Concept Inventory Really Measure Conceptual Understanding of Calculus?

Posted on July 25, 2016 by

By Spencer Bagley, University of Northern Colorado; Jim Gleason, University of Alabama; Lisa Rice, Arkansas State University; Matt Thomas, Ithaca College, Diana White, Contributing Editor, University of Colorado Denver

(Note: Authors are listed alphabetically; all authors contributed equally to the preparation of this blog entry.)

Concept inventories have emerged over the past two decades as one way to measure conceptual understanding in STEM disciplines, with the Calculus Concept Inventory (CCI), developed by Epstein and colleagues (Epstein, 2007, 2013), being one of the primary instruments developed in the area of differential calculus.  The CCI is a criterion-referenced instrument, measuring classroom normalized gains, which specifically is the change in the class average divided by the possible change in the class average.  Its goal was to evaluate the impact of teaching techniques on conceptual learning of differential calculus.  

While the CCI represents a good start toward measuring calculus understanding, recent studies point out some significant issues with the instrument.  This is concerning, given that there seems to be an increased use of the instrument in formal and informal studies and assessment.  For example, in a recent special issue of PRIMUS (Maxson & Szaniszlo, 2015a, 2015b) related to flipped classrooms in mathematics, three of the five papers dealing with calculus cited and used the CCI.  In this blog we provide an overview of concept inventories, discuss the CCI, outline some problems we found, and suggest future needs for high-quality conceptual measures of calculus understanding.

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The Second Year of “On Teaching and Learning Mathematics”

Posted on July 11, 2016 by

By Art Duval, Contributing Editor, University of Texas at El Paso

Another year has flown by, and so it is once again a good time to collect and reflect on all the articles we have been able to share with you since our last annual review.  I enjoyed the chance to re-read all the articles, and I was also surprised at the interesting variety of themes that emerged when I sorted them out.  It was not easy to put each article in a unique box, and I will point out the blurring between categories.  I hope you enjoy the chance to revisit these articles, and perhaps find new meaning from the juxtapositions here.

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Learning Mathematics in Context with Modeling and Technology

Posted on June 27, 2016 by

Dr. Brian Winkel, Professor Emeritus, Mathematical Sciences, United States Military Academy, West Point NY USA and Director of SIMIODE.

I cannot accept that mathematics be taught in a vacuum. Yes, mathematics is beautiful, be it pure or applied. However, in our age of immediacy for students we need to move more of our efforts to teaching mathematics in context, in touch with the real world. We should incorporate more modeling and applications in our mathematics courses to richly support and motivate our students in their attempts to learn mathematics and we should support colleagues who seek to use this approach.

Over the course of time I have moved to this position. At first I used applications of mathematics in course lectures, e.g., error correcting codes in algebra, cryptology in number theory, life sciences in calculus, and engineering in differential equations. Then I assigned students to read articles in other disciplines and share these applications in class. Finally, I incorporated projects in which students could see and practice the application of mathematics.  Introducing a modeling scenario makes the mathematics immediate; what do I do right now?  Students desire to address the problem at hand, which is real to them, primarily because it intrigues them and piques their curiosity. Thus the mathematics becomes a necessary tool they are ready to learn. I eventually used the application to motivate the learning of the mathematics before introducing that mathematics.  This is a “flipping” of content.  

Some students are a bit shy, even resistant, to this approach. However, in an active and supportive learning environment in which students work in small groups and the teacher works the room by watching, visiting, listening, and assisting the groups, students do amazing things. Sometimes they get off a workable track, but colleagues and teachers bring them along. Students make mistakes, but as we know, learning from mistakes is an important part of learning [BrownEtAl2014]. Indeed, we do it all the time ourselves and call it conjecture and research. Continue reading →

Posted in Assessment Practices, Classroom Practices, Multidisciplinary Education, Student Experiences | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Imagining Equity

Posted on June 13, 2016 by

By Priscilla Bremser, Contributing Editor, Middlebury College

In my Mathematics for Teachers course, students take a fresh look at foundational concepts, such as fractions and place value, from an advanced perspective.  For some of them, our work together exposes weaknesses in their backgrounds, and unsettling stories emerge regularly, but  B.’s story stands out.  B. was a senior Japanese Studies major who offered insightful observations during problem-solving sessions.  As the semester progressed, it became clear that there was a gap in his mathematical knowledge.  He explained that he moved to the U.S. speaking only Spanish, and missed out on the mathematics being taught while he was learning English. He soon moved to a different city, and never learned how to add fractions.  A significant chunk of the college curriculum was inaccessible to him because his middle school had no mechanism for accommodating his language transition.  B. has many strengths, and he will do well in the world, but he was shortchanged at a critical phase in his mathematics education.

We have all had students who arrive at college unprepared to do college-level mathematics.  While there are many contributing factors at play, it’s clear that inequities in pre-K-12 education systems play an important role.  It’s also clear that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make up in four years for disparities experienced over fifteen years. Although we work in higher education, nevertheless we must advocate for greater equity in pre-college education.  If we don’t, we’re simply perpetuating injustice.

That injustice is reflected in persistent and significant differences in educational attainment among demographic groups in the United States.  It’s not just that students from some groups are less prepared for college. Those college students have too many peers who don’t have access to college at all, for reasons that are well beyond their, or their families’, control. Continue reading →

Posted in Education Policy, K-12 Education | 5 Comments

Thick Derivatives

Posted on May 31, 2016 by

by Tevian Dray, Professor, Department of Mathematics, Oregon State University

One of the iconic messages of the calculus reforms that took place in the 1990s is the “Rule of Four,” emphasizing the use of multiple representations: algebraic, geometric, numeric, and verbal. But what is a numerical representation of the derivative?

In a recent study [1], we asked faculty in mathematics, physics, and engineering to determine a derivative based on experimental data they had to collect themselves, using the apparatus shown in Figure 1. The physicists and engineers had no trouble doing so—but the mathematicians refused to acknowledge a computed average rate of change, however accurate, as a derivative. The physicists and engineers knew full well that their computation was an approximation, but they also knew how to ensure that it was a good one.

PDM Figure 1: The Partial Derivatives Machine, designed by David Roundy at Oregon State University. In this mechanical analog of a thermodynamic system, the variables are the two string positions (the flags) and the tensions in the strings (the weights). However, it is not obvious which variables are independent, nor even how many independent variables there are. For further details, see [1].

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Believing in Mathematics

Posted on May 16, 2016 by

By Benjamin Braun, Editor-in-Chief, University of Kentucky

In my experience, many students in K-12 and post-secondary mathematics courses believe that:

  • all math problems have known answers,
  • failure and misunderstanding are absent from successful mathematics,
  • their instructor can always find answers to problems, and
  • regardless of what instructors say, students will be judged and/or assessed based on whether or not they can obtain correct answers to problems they are given.

As long as students believe in this mythology, it is hard to motivate them to develop quality mathematical practices. In an effort to undercut these misunderstandings and unproductive beliefs about the nature of mathematics, over the past several years I’ve experimented with assignments and activities that purposefully range across the intellectual, behavioral, and emotional psychological domains. In this article, I provide a toolbox of activities for faculty interested in incorporating these or similar interventions in their courses.

Psychological Domains

A useful oversimplification frames the human psyche as a three-stranded model:

psyche Continue reading →

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A Framework for Integrating Conceptual and Procedural Understanding in the First Two Years of Undergraduate Mathematics

Posted on May 2, 2016 by

By Karen Keene and Nicholas Fortune, North Carolina State University

One common instructional approach during the first two years of undergraduate mathematics in courses such as calculus or differential equations is to teach primarily analytic techniques (procedures) to solve problems and find solutions. In differential equations, for example, this is true whether the course is strictly analytical or focuses on both analytic techniques and qualitative methods for analysis of solutions.

While these analytic techniques play a major part of the early undergraduate mathematics curriculum, there is significant discussion and research about the importance of learning the concepts of mathematics. Many researchers in mathematics education encourage teaching mathematics where students learn the concepts before the procedures and are guided through the process of reinventing traditional procedures themselves (e.g., Heibert, 2013). Additionally, educators who have developed mathematical learning theories often set up a dichotomy between the two kinds of learning (e.g., Skemp, 1975; Haapasalo & Kadijevich, 2000). At the collegiate level, we as professors may agree that these educational ideas hold merit, but also firmly believe that students have a significant amount of content to learn and may not always be able to spend the time necessary to allow students to participate fully in the development of conceptual understanding and the reinvention of the mathematics (including procedures).

However, some researchers, including ourselves, provide evidence that “teaching the procedures to solve problems and find solutions” and “providing ways for teaching concepts first so students will truly understand” can be integrated, and that the notion of learning procedures does not need to be shallow and merely a memorized list (Star, 2005; Hassenbrank & Hodgson, 2007). Our framework to merge these two ways of teaching is titled the Framework for Relational Understanding of Procedures. It was developed as part of Rasmussen and colleagues’ work in differential equations teaching and learning (Rasmussen et. al., 2006). Skemp coined the original definition; she defines relational understanding as “knowing both what to do and why” and contrasts it to instrumental understanding as “rules without reason” (1976, p. 21).

Following, we describe the six components of the Framework for Relational Understanding of Procedures. The idea is that each category can be used to consider and enhance students’ learning as they study a procedure.  For each one, we provide a brief explanation, questions about student thinking, and an example of an exam question related to each component taken from our work in differential equations.  Likely, each instructor could add other algorithms in differential equations as well as other courses.

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