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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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