Mathematics Commons^™

On The Persistence And Attrition Of Women In Mathematics, Katrina Piatek-Jimenez

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The purpose of this study was to investigate what motivates women to choose mathematics as an undergraduate major and to further explore what shapes their future career goals, paying particular attention to their undergraduate experiences and their perceptions of the role of gender in these decisions. A series of semi-structured, individual interviews were conducted with twelve undergraduate women mathematics majors who were attending either a large public university or a small liberal arts college. This study found that strong mathematical identities and enjoyment of mathematics heavily influenced their decisions to major in mathematics. At the career selection stage, these women …

Improving University Students' Perception Of Mathematics And Mathematics Ability, Shelly L. Wismath, Alyson Worrall

Numeracy

Although mathematical and quantitative reasoning skills are an essential part of adult life in our society, many students arrive at post-secondary education without such skills. Taking a standard mathematics course such as calculus may do little to improve those skills. Using a modification of the Tapia & Marsh questionnaire, we surveyed 62 students taking a broad quantitative reasoning course designed to develop quantitative skills, with respect to two broad attitudinal areas: students’ perception of their own ability, confidence and anxiety, and their perception of the value of mathematics in their studies and their lives. Pre- to post-course comparisons were done …

Developing The Horizon Content Knowledge Of Teachers Through A Math Teachers’ Circle, Tom Clark

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Although much of the training pre-service mathematics teachers receive is either in mathematical content or educational theory and pedagogy, research indicates that mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT), which lies in a sense at the intersection of the two, is a factor in teacher quality. Unfortunately, none of the recent improvements in teacher preparation necessarily affect in-service mathematics teachers. One successful program affecting in-service teachers nationwide is the Math Teachers’ Circle Network. One strand of MKT that I believe math teachers’ circles are in a position to affect is Horizon Content Knowledge (HCK). Although taking advanced mathematics courses may improve HCK, …

Flipping The Classroom And Mathematica-Based Modules In Complex Analysis, Maa Session On Revitalizing Complex Analysis At The Undergraduate Level, Ii., William M. Kinney

Math and Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

2015 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program, Northeastern State University

Oklahoma Research Day Abstracts

This document contains all abstracts from the 2015 Oklahoma Research Day held at Northeastern State University.

Investigating The Engagement Of Mature Students With Mathematics Learning Support, Cormac Breen, Michael Carr, Mark Prendergast

Articles

The Maths Learning Support Centre (MLSC) in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) provides free mathematical support to all DIT students. This support is primarily delivered through a drop-in service, where students can receive one-to-one tuition, without an appointment, in any area of mathematics. In the first semester of the 2013/14 academic year, a significant proportion of students that availed of this drop-in service were mature students enrolled in Engineering programmes. This is of particular interest as mature students constitute a relatively small proportion of the total student body, motivating a deeper study of the reasons for the high levels …

Maximizing The Impact Of Digital Supports In Mathematics Learning Support In Higher Education – An Overview Of The 9th Annual Imlsn Workshop, Cormac Breen, Anthony Cronin

Articles

In this article we give a short description of the 9th Annual Workshop of the Irish Mathematics Learning Support Network (IMLSN). The workshop theme was ‘Maximizing the impact of digital supports in Mathematics Learning Support in Higher Education’. We briefly describe the Irish Mathematics Learning Support Network (IMLSN) and outline the factors that motivated this workshop theme. We will also discuss the presentations, some of the issues that were raised during the workshop and we close with some brief conclusions on this very successful event.

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 …

Mathematics Education In A Multilingual And Multicultural Environment, Anjum Halai, Richard Barwell

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Math Anxiety In The Primary Grades, Amanda R. Anderson-Mix

Mathematics Graduate Theses

Math anxiety is an increasingly common occurrence among individuals when working with mathematical concepts. While researching math anxiety the author came across common gender stereotypes implying: women do not perform as well as men in the field of mathematics, women experience a much higher level of math anxiety than men, and most women do not appreciate performing mathematical tasks. Although the concept of math anxiety is an interesting topic to the author, it's important to look deeper than simply the question, “What is math anxiety?” Seeing these stereotypical assumptions that women have higher math anxiety levels, it made this author …

Teacher Influence On Elementary School Students’ Participation In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics, Courtney Hartman

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of elementary school teachers on encouraging students’ interest and participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The researcher sought to understand what methods teachers use in their classrooms to encourage students to participate in STEM subjects and programs. This mixed methods study consisted of a questionnaire to collect quantitative data, as well as an interview of selected teachers who participated in the questionnaire to collect qualitative data. The data was analyzed to determine the overall perceptions of teachers regarding the importance of encouraging students to participate in STEM. The qualitative …

Modeling The Progress And Retention Of International Students Using Markov Chains, Lucas Gagne

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

International students are a small and diverse student population present in any sizable American university. One of the greatest obstacles in their path is the acquisition of the English language. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, such as the English Language Institute (ELI) at the University of Akron, attempt to address this problem. By studying how this student population progresses in their academic studies, EAP programs and their associated universities can make well-informed decisions on how best to serve their English Language Learners. One way to study International students is through the use of a Markov model based on university …

The Wright Message, 2015-2016, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Mathematics.

The Wright Message

Inside this issue:

-- Dear Alumni and Friends
-- Dr. Edward Rathmell retires from UNI
-- 2015 Hari Shankar Lecture
-- Around Wright Hall
-- Congratulations to....
-- Faculty Highlights
-- Student News
-- 2015-2016 Tenure-Stream Faculty
-- Alumni Spotlight: Clayton Edwards & Mary Theilen
-- Department Interviews: Adrienne Stanley, Joel Haack, , Benjamin Castle & Suzanne Shontz
-- UNI Students Travel to Korea
-- Trijitzsky Scholarship Winner Emily Wardenburg
-- Student Spotlights: Amber Irlmeier, Britney Bockstahler, Derek Hofland & Julia Robinson
-- PAEMST Award Winner Allysen Lovstuen
-- Donor Spotlight: Alan and Barbara Hubbard
-- News fro KME
-- …

Professional Formation Of Engineers: Enhancing The First Year Student Experience, Eileen Goold

Conference Papers

This paper reports on a study investigating engineering students’ perceptions of engineering practice and whether engineering students’ cognitive engagement benefits from bridging the gap between the technical issues in their education and the practical realities of modern engineering practice.

The Relationship Among Math Anxiety, Mathematical Performance, And Math Education In Undergraduate Nursing Students, Joshua D. Beall, Troy Roebuck, Paul Penkalsky

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Although nurses spend up to 40% of their day calculating and administering medication doses, undergraduate nursing students often perform poorly on nursing math exams. The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the relationship among mathematical education, performance, and anxiety and (b) to compare the mathematical education, performance, and anxiety in sophomore and senior baccalaureate nursing students at a public university in the Midwest. This cross-sectional, descriptive study was guided by Bandura's self-efficacy theory. Math performance was measured with an 11-item math instrument, math education was measured with number of math courses, and math anxiety was measured with Fennema–Sherman …

Teac 451p: Learning And Teaching Principles And Practices (Secondary Mathematics)—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Lorraine Males

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The goal of my peer review portfolio was to better understand how to improve students' learning of how to teach secondary mathematics in reform-oriented ways. Most students that pursue admission into the Secondary Mathematics Teacher Education Program have little to no experience learning mathematics in reform-oriented ways. These preservice teachers (PSTs) were “successful” in mathematics courses in middle and high school, most of them taking honors or accelerated courses. However, many of these PSTs did not have opportunities to engage as active participants in their own learning and develop complex cognitive skills and processes, the focus of reform-oriented instruction. This …

Challenges In Assessing College Students' Conception Of Duality: The Case Of Infinity, Grace Olutayo Babarinsa-Ochiedike

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Interpreting students' views of infinity posits a challenge for researchers due to the dynamic nature of the conception. There is diversity and variation among students' process-object perceptions. The fluctuations between studentsâ?? views however reveal an undeveloped duality conception. This study examined college students' conception of duality in understanding and representing infinity with the intent to design strategies that could guide researchers in categorizing students' views of infinity into different levels.

Data for the study were collected from N=238 college students enrolled in Calculus sequence courses (Pre-Calculus, Calculus I through Calculus III) at one of the southwestern universities in the U.S. …

Primary Spaces, Mackey's Obstruction, And The Generalized Barycentric Decomposition, Patrick Iglesias-Zemmour, Francois Ziegler

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

We call a hamiltonian N-space primary if its moment map is onto a single coadjoint orbit. The question has long been open whether such spaces always split as (homogeneous) x (trivial), as an analogy with representation theory might suggest. For instance, Souriau's barycentric decomposition theorem asserts just this when N is a Heisenberg group. For general N, we give explicit examples which do not split, and show instead that primary spaces are always flat bundles over the coadjoint orbit. This provides the missing piece for a full "Mackey theory" of hamiltonian G-spaces, where G is an overgroup in which N …

Graphs Obtained From Collections Of Blocks, Colton Magnant, Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani, Hua Wang

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

Given a collection of d-dimensional rectangular solids called blocks, no two of which sharing interior points, construct a block graph by adding a vertex for each block and an edge if the faces of the two corresponding blocks intersect nontrivially. It is known that if d ≥ 3, such block graphs can have arbitrarily large chromatic number. We prove that the chromatic number can be bounded with only a mild restriction on the sizes of the blocks. We also show that block graphs of block configurations arising from partitions of d-dimensional hypercubes into sub-hypercubes are at least d-connected. Bounds on …

Kumaraswamy Lindley-Poisson Distribution: Theory And Applications, Mavis Pararai, Broderick O. Oluyede, Gayan Warahena-Liyanage

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

The Kumaraswamy Lindley-Poisson (KLP) distribution which is an extension of the Lindley-Poisson Distribution [21] is introduced and its properties are explored. This new distribution represents a more flexible model for the lifetime data. Some statistical properties of the proposed distribution including the shapes of the density and hazard rate functions are explored. Moments, entropy measures and the distribution of the order statistics are given. The maximum likelihood estimation technique is used to estimate the model parameters and a simulation study is conducted to investigate the performance of the maximum likelihood estimates. Finally some applications of the model with real data …

Log-Concavity And Symplectic Rows, Yi Lin, Álvaro Pelayo

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

The Duistermaat-Heckman measure of a Hamiltonian torus action on a symplectic manifold (M,ω) is the push forward of the Liouville measure on M by the momentum map of the action. In this paper we prove the logarithmic concavity of the Duistermaat-Heckman measure of a complexity two Hamiltonian torus action, for which there exists an effective commuting symplectic action of a 2-torus with symplectic orbits. Using this, we show that given a complexity two symplectic torus action satisfying the additional 2-torus action condition, if the fixed point set is non-empty, then it has to be Hamiltonian. This implies a classical result …

The Log-Generalized Lindley-Weibull Distribution With Applications, Broderick O. Oluyede, Fedelis Mutiso, Shujiao Huang

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

A new distribution called the log generalized Lindley-Weibull (LGLW) distribution for modeling lifetime data is proposed. This model further generalizes the Lindley distribution and allows for hazard rate functions that are monotonically decreasing, monotonically increasing and bathtub shaped. A comprehensive investigation and account of the mathematical and statistical properties including moments, moment generating function, simulation issues and entropy are presented. Estimates of model parameters via the method of maximum likelihood are given. Real data examples are presented to illustrate the usefulness and applicability of this new distribution.

A Generalized Class Of Kumaraswamy Lindley Distribution With Applications To Lifetime Data, Broderick O. Oluyede, Tiantian Yang, Bernard Omolo

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

In this paper, we propose a new class of generalized distributions called the Exponentiated Kumaraswamy Lindley (EKL) distribution, as well as related sub-distributions. This class of distributions contains the Kumaraswamy Lindley (KL), generalized Lindley (GL), and Lindley (L) distributions as special cases. A series expansion of the density is obtained. Statistical properties of this class of distributions, including the hazard and reverse hazard functions, monotonicity property, shapes, moments, reliability, quantile function, mean deviations, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, entropy and Fisher information are derived among others. The method of maximum likelihood is adopted for estimating the model parameters. Two applications to …

A New Class Of Generalized Power Lindley Distribution With Applications To Lifetime Data, Marvis Pararai, Gayan Warahena-Liyanage, Broderick O. Oluyede

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

A new class of distribution called the beta-exponentiated power Lindley (BEPL) distribution is proposed. This class of distributions includes the Lindley (L), exponentiated Lindley (EL), power Lindley (PL), exponentiated power Lindley (EPL), beta-exponentiated Lindley (BEL), beta-Lindley (BL), and beta-power Lindley distributions (BPL) as special cases. Expansion of the density of BEPL distribution is obtained. Some mathematical properties of the new distribution including hazard function, reverse hazard function, moments, mean deviations, Lorenz and Bonferroni curves are presented. Entropy measures and the distribution of the order statistics are given. The maximum likelihood estimation technique is used to estimate the model parameters. Finally, …

New Families Of Weighted Sum Formulas For Multiple Zeta Values, Yuan Zhao, Jianqiang Zhao

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

In this paper we use the generating functions and the double shuffle relations satisfied by the multiple zeta values to derive some new families of identities.

A Family Of Multiple Harmonic Sum And Multiple Zeta Star Value Identities, Erin Linebarger, Jianqiang Zhao

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

In this paper we present a new family of identities for multiple harmonic sums which generalize a recent result of Hessami Pilehrood et al [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. (to appear)]. We then apply it to obtain a family of identities relating multiple zeta star values to alternating Euler sums. In such a typical identity the entries of the multiple zeta star values consist of blocks of arbitrarily long 2-strings separated by positive integers greater than two while the largest depth of the alternating Euler sums depends only on the number of 2-string blocks but not on their lengths.

Introductory Texts

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators

• GAMTE 2015 Officers
• GAMTE 2015 Conference Committee
• GAMTE 2015 Proceeding Committee
• Purposes and Goals of GAMTE
• Letter from the President
• Table of Contents

Engaging In Lesson Study At Georgia College, Angel R. Abney, Brandon Samples, Doris Santarone

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators

A lesson study cycle is a professional development process that integrates research and reflection through collaboration. The cycle allows a group to refine a lesson based on these collaboration efforts such as interaction with students and the post-lesson discussion. Secondary pre-service teachers in a mathematics methods course engaged in a lesson study cycle through collaboration between in-service teachers, Georgia College professors, and students in a local high school classroom. We systematically investigated this process to determine that through preparing, enacting and reflecting on their practice, Pre-service Teachers (PST) developed insight, reasoning, and understanding of the mathematics that they taught.

Using Ti-Nspire To Engage Preservice Mathematics Teachers In An Exploratory Geometry Module, Alesia D. Mickle, Pier A. Junor Clarke

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators

In the mathematics classroom, most preservice mathematics teachers possess basic skills to use technology as an instructional strategy in communicating content standards. However, today’s demands for preservice teachers to engage in a variety of “best teaching practices” in their preservice teaching and edTPA requirements can oftentimes place the acquisition of technical skills and integration of new technology in content curriculum far from the forefront of their minds. Ertmer, Conklin, Lewandowski, Osika, Selo, and Wignall (2003) acknowledged preservice teachers’ desires to gain the adequate technical skills necessary to use technology in teachers’ daily tasks of facilitating and managing their classrooms. They …

Effects Of Single-Gender And Coeducational Learning Environments On Middle School Mathematics Achievement, Tasha Graves Henderson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

As a result of the increased number of schools failing to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP), school districts are searching for innovative ways to raise student achievement and meet the rigorous performance standards set by state governments. Using the theoretical framework provided by brain research and the theory of multiple intelligences, the purpose of this quantitative study was to compare 2 middle school classroom structures for differences in mathematics achievement among students. The study examined whether a significant difference existed in mathematics achievement scores on the state-mandated mathematics test for 2 groups (single gender classes versus coeducational classes) in 6 …