What is the Focus of your investigation and what is your question? At this point, the focus of my investigation is on how students grow and view mathematical questions during a freshman workshop course at LMU (that I will be teaching for the first time, but that Jackie has taught for the previous 4 years). I am interested in looking at how students change in several ways: 1) How do students view of mathematical problem solving and mathematics. 2) How mathematical students approaches are to seemingly non-mathematical tasks (writing, problem-solving) ? 3) What aspects of the class create the greatest student growth? 4) How are moments of difficulty viewed by students? What will be your approach, and what will constitute evidence? I am still working on my approach. That said: I plan to begin with a survey containing both open-ended questions and a Likert scale. This will be similar to before and after surveys given in previous years. In addition, we will be adding 3 or 4 non-mathematical writing assignments after the completion of which we ask the students to reflect on how they approached the task and how it relates to what we are doing in class. The last two questions will entail having the students write reflective pieces and keep a class portfolio, which we will analyze at the end of the term.

How will you move your project forward between now and January? By January I will have taught the first of the two course sequence. Our plan is to have some data already collected, and Jackie and I will have analyzed data from previous students. In addition, Jackie and I will be looking at how students further along in the major view mathematical problem solving and transfer information.

What questions do you still have; what is not yet clear to you? The questions are still too broad. I really want to tell the story of this class, and I also want to address the issue of transferring a non-traditional mathematics course from a developer (Jackie) to a user (me) and how one can best avoid losing the heart of the class (the growth in students on problem solving, matheamtics beyond the classroom, and student community. In addition, I am unsure what evidence will show up from the non-mathematical tasks, and I have no real idea about how to view moments of difficulty in this context. What will be your first steps, and who can help you? This week Jackie and I see the head of Loyola Marymount's Center for Teaching Excellence, who also teaches qualitative analysis! We will be talking to her about evidence gathering and analysis. We also need to design prompts and revamp the surveys to get at our questions better. Finally, I want to look at what prompts I should include in the portfolio to get at moments of difficulty (which I will refer to as quality of failure). Jackie, Trish Walsh are obvious people to help, but I will also be looking for colleagues at the MAA Mathfest to discuss this with.