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Full-Text Articles in Mathematics

Me And Mathematics: “Doing What You’Re Talking About”: In Dialogue With My Family, Eden Morris Jun 2024

Me And Mathematics: “Doing What You’Re Talking About”: In Dialogue With My Family, Eden Morris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is a philosophically oriented accompaniment to my audio project (accessible through the following link: https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/me-and-mathematics). Working together, the paper and audio collages form a call to action and a resource. My primary finding is the importance of doing what you’re talking about or exploring and implementing your ideas experientially. Doing what you’re talking about is important for effective teaching/learning and feeling in line with oneself. This working concept came to my attention during my research conversation with my oldest living relative, and then, again, with my youngest (non-baby) relative. This doing what you’re talking about is a way …


Floor Plan Assignment In Elementary Mathematics Education, Tunde Jakab Jan 2021

Floor Plan Assignment In Elementary Mathematics Education, Tunde Jakab

Open Educational Resources

In this upper elementary mathematics education assignment, the prospective teachers gain hands-on experience in measuring distances in feet and inches, calculating areas, and converting distance and area measurements. Moreover, they solve a real-life situation by choosing the most economical tiles for their kitchen. This last part (3) of the assignment develops critical thinking and expressing one's thought processes. Part 3 can be used as an in-class discussion, which further promotes reasoning skills.


Interdisciplinary Thinking: Financial Literacy Crosses Disciplinary Boundaries, Marla A. Sole Jan 2021

Interdisciplinary Thinking: Financial Literacy Crosses Disciplinary Boundaries, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

Financial literacy is ideally suited to be integrated into mathematics courses and taught in an interdisciplinary manner. Students learn best and are motivated when tackling real-world meaningful questions. This article shares how elementary mathematics was applied to better understand the debate about raising the minimum wage and the United States National Debt. To serve as a guide for other teachers who wish to incorporate financial literacy into their mathematics courses and take an interdisciplinary approach, this article suggests readings, data sets, and pedagogical practices. Students were engaged and enthusiastic to work on problems that challenged their thinking about financial issues.


Black And Brown Students’ Mathematics Anxiety In Elementary School: The Use Of Restorative Justice Circles And Critical Concepts Of Care, Hope, And Love, Mariana E. Winnik Feb 2020

Black And Brown Students’ Mathematics Anxiety In Elementary School: The Use Of Restorative Justice Circles And Critical Concepts Of Care, Hope, And Love, Mariana E. Winnik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children navigate their world and are constantly making meaning of their experiences. Through this meaning making, children are also constructing their identities. Black and Brown children have an added layer of identity construction compared to their White peers. Black and Brown students develop their racial identity in conjunction with multiple other identities. This paper focuses specifically on how Black and Brown students construct a "mathematics identity" that is meaningful to their racial identity in order to help lessen their mathematics anxiety. I argue that the use of Restorative Justice Circles (RJC) in classrooms will allow for students to bring their …


Understanding The Impact Of Peer-Led Workshops On Student Learning, Afolabi Ibitoye, Nadia Kennedy, Armando Cosme May 2019

Understanding The Impact Of Peer-Led Workshops On Student Learning, Afolabi Ibitoye, Nadia Kennedy, Armando Cosme

Publications and Research

As students we often wonder why some subjects are easy to understand and requires not much effort in terms of re-reading the material, for us to grasp what it entails. One subject seems to remain elusive and uneasy for a vast majority of learners at all levels of education; that subject is Mathematics, it is one subject that most learners finds difficult even after doubling the amount of time spent on studying the material. My intention is to explore ways to make Mathematics easier for other students using feedback from students enrolled in NSF mathematics peer leading workshops, and use …


Teaching With Technology: Using A Virtual Learning Community And Peer Mentoring To Create An Interdisciplinary Intervention, Rebecca Mazumdar, Nadia Benakli, Pamela Brown Jan 2019

Teaching With Technology: Using A Virtual Learning Community And Peer Mentoring To Create An Interdisciplinary Intervention, Rebecca Mazumdar, Nadia Benakli, Pamela Brown

Publications and Research

This paper describes the development and implementation of engaging and supportive experiences to promote student engagement, persistence and success at a commuter, open enrollment, public, minority serving institution. Project components included faculty development at the SENCER Summer Institute (SSI) 2016, attended by a team comprised of an academic administrator, full-time faculty from English and math, and part-time faculty in chemistry; creation of a virtual learning community of freshmen enrolled in chemistry, English, and math linked by the specific theme of the environmental impacts of deicing roads with salt and the overarching theme of the impacts of human activities on the …


Teaching And Learning Mathematics In The Ar/Vr Environment, Alexander Vaninsky Jan 2017

Teaching And Learning Mathematics In The Ar/Vr Environment, Alexander Vaninsky

Publications and Research

This presentation discusses teaching and learning mathematics in augmented (AR) or virtual (VR) reality created by a combination of goggles and earphones. It claims that interactive learning in such an environment is more attractive and efficient. It increases motivation and interest in the subject matter. The approach is underlain by the findings of educational neuroscience considering the learning process as the formation of domains in the brain forming mathematics knowledge centers. The teaching process provides sensory excitation and establishes connections among these and other domains. Hardware and software are available in the market. The suggested approach allows for practical implementation …


Case Study Of Undergraduate Research Projects In Vector Analysis, Alexander Vaninsky, Willy Baez Lara, Madieng Diao, Analilia Mendez Jan 2017

Case Study Of Undergraduate Research Projects In Vector Analysis, Alexander Vaninsky, Willy Baez Lara, Madieng Diao, Analilia Mendez

Publications and Research

This paper presents two examples of the undergraduate research projects in vector analysis conducted under the first author’s supervision at one of the community colleges that is an integral part of a large city university. The projects were accomplished by the students pursuing associated degrees in engineering, during their sophomore year. One project was to obtain an explicit formula for the curvature of a curve in plane defined implicitly in rectangular or polar coordinates. Another project was aimed to develop an alternative procedure for finding potential function for a vector field in space based on simultaneous integration. Participation in these …


The Remedy That's Killing: Cuny, Laguardia, And The Fight For Better Math Policy, Rachel A. Oppenheimer Jun 2016

The Remedy That's Killing: Cuny, Laguardia, And The Fight For Better Math Policy, Rachel A. Oppenheimer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nationwide, there is a crisis in math learning and math achievement at all levels of education. Upwards of 80% of students who enter the City University of New York’s community colleges from New York City’s Department of Education high schools fail to meet college level math proficiencies and as a result, are funneled into the system’s remedial math system. Once placed into pre-college remedial arithmetic, pre-algebra, and elementary algebra courses, students fail at alarming rates and research indicates that students’ failure in remedial math has negative ripple effects on their persistence and degree completion. CUNY is not alone in facing …


A Modularized Tablet-Based Approach To Preparation For Remedial Mathematics, Kenneth A. Parker May 2016

A Modularized Tablet-Based Approach To Preparation For Remedial Mathematics, Kenneth A. Parker

Publications and Research

Basic arithmetic forms the foundation of the math courses that students will face in their undergraduate careers. It is therefore crucial that students have a solid understanding of these fundamental concepts. At an open- access university offering both two-year and four-year degrees, incoming freshmen who were identified as lacking in basic arithmetic skills were engaged in an experimental technology-enhanced workshop designed to provide them with a deeper understanding of arithmetic prior to their initial remedial coursework. Customized online content was created specifically for this experiment, and the first implementation (n=27) yielded statistically significant improvement, not only from pretest to post- …


Multiple Problem-Solving Strategies Provide Insight Into Students’ Understanding Of Open-Ended Linear Programming Problems, Marla A. Sole Jan 2016

Multiple Problem-Solving Strategies Provide Insight Into Students’ Understanding Of Open-Ended Linear Programming Problems, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

Open-ended questions that can be solved using different strategies help students learn and integrate content, and provide teachers with greater insights into students’ unique capabilities and levels of understanding. This article provides a problem that was modified to allow for multiple approaches. Students tended to employ high-powered, complex, familiar solution strategies rather than simpler, more intuitive strategies, which suggests that students might need more experience working with informal solution methods. During the semester, by incorporating open-ended questions, I gained valuable feedback, was able to better model real-world problems, challenge students with different abilities, and strengthen students’ problem solving skills.


Supporting Teachers’ Learning About Mathematical Modeling, June L. Gastón, Barbara A. Lawrence Oct 2015

Supporting Teachers’ Learning About Mathematical Modeling, June L. Gastón, Barbara A. Lawrence

Publications and Research

In the United States, one of the Standards for Mathematical Practice of the Common Core Curriculum (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) is Model with mathematics. This standard requires that students be taught in a manner that will enable them to ―apply the mathematics they know to solve problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace‖ (p. 7). However many prospective and practicing teachers acquire a pedagogical style that does not support this standard. To promote higher levels of student thinking associated with mathematical modeling, teachers must thus be taught not only what mathematical modeling is, but how it …


Numeracy Infusion Course For Higher Education (Niche), 1: Teaching Faculty How To Improve Students' Quantitative Reasoning Skills Through Cognitive Illusions, Frank Wang, Esther I. Wilder Jan 2015

Numeracy Infusion Course For Higher Education (Niche), 1: Teaching Faculty How To Improve Students' Quantitative Reasoning Skills Through Cognitive Illusions, Frank Wang, Esther I. Wilder

Publications and Research

We describe one of the eight units of a professional development program, the Numeracy Infusion Course for Higher Education (NICHE), which introduces research on cognition, including dual-processing theories, to university faculty. Under the dual-processing framework, System 1 (intuition) quickly proposes intuitive answers to judgment problems as they arise, while System 2 (deliberation) monitors the quality of these proposals, which it may endorse, correct, or override. We present several classic questions that demonstrate the pitfalls of overreliance on intuition without analytical thinking, then describe faculty participants’ responses to these questions and their ideas on how to apply cognitive illusion research to …


A Primer For Mathematical Modeling, Marla A. Sole Oct 2013

A Primer For Mathematical Modeling, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

With the implementation of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recommendations and the adoption of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, modeling has moved to the forefront of K-12 education. Modeling activities not only reinforce purposeful problem-solving skills, they also connect the mathematics students learn in school with the mathematics they will use outside of school. Instructors have found mathematical modeling difficult to teach. To successfully incorporate modeling activities I believe that curricular changes should be accompanied by professional development for curriculum developers, classroom teachers, and higher education professionals. This article serves as an introduction to modeling by …


The Mathematics Portfolio: An Alternative Tool To Evaluate Students’ Progress, Marla A. Sole Apr 2012

The Mathematics Portfolio: An Alternative Tool To Evaluate Students’ Progress, Marla A. Sole

Publications and Research

This article describes the need for more thorough and varied forms of assessment to evaluate students’ level of understanding in mathematics. Portfolios are one type of assessment tool that, when added to a teacher’s repertoire can improve students’ comprehension and retention and enable students to monitor their own progress and to take more responsibility for their own learning. Portfolio assignments can also help students and teachers to detect and remedy weaknesses and misunderstandings and can increase students’ self-confidence in mathematics. This article discusses what a portfolio is, gives an example of a unit portfolio used in an undergraduate Finite Mathematics …