Functional Thinking in the Mathematics Curriculum

By David Bressoud @dbressoud The International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) meets every four years and produces a series of monographs based on the contributed papers. One important monograph from ICME-13, held in 2016 in Hamburg, Germany, has just been released: The Legacy of Felix Klein, published Open Access by Springer. Part II of this...

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What is mathematical creativity, how do we develop it, and should we try to measure it? PART 1

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin In its January 1 Learning Blog, the business networking service LinkedIn published a list of the skills today’s large companies value most in their employees, as obtained from survey data. The report notes that 57% of senior leaders in business value soft (human-centered) skills over hard skills, pointing out that “the rise...

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VITAL Faculty: A Growing Workforce in Colleges and Universities

By Rachel Levy, Deputy Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America The landscape of faculty positions is changing, as documented in the CBMS survey report.  To get a comparison from 2010 to 2015 you can enjoy a little data dive into table E.5 below and find plenty more online in the full report.  Faculty...

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Reflections on the Just Equations Equity Report

By David Bressoud @dbressoud Equity. What does it mean in the context of mathematics instruction? No one argues that all students have the same opportunities to learn. Nevertheless, there is a widespread belief, common among mathematicians as well as the population at large, that there is nothing wrong with what we teach or how we...

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Teaching college-level math to students who grew up in a connected world

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin The primary purpose of K-16 education, we say, is to prepare the next generation for life in society. CAUTION: The “we” here refers to those of us who are educators, and for an audience comprising only professional educators, my opening statement would stand on its own. But in an open, online...

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Data Analytics in the Undergraduate Curriculum

By David Bressoud @dbressoud The National Academies will be holding a Roundtable on Data Science Postsecondary Education: Motivating Data Science Education through Social Good on December 10, 2018. Event Website  If I had to choose the most common job title for students who have graduated from Macalester with a degree in Mathematics, it would be...

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To Boldly Go …

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin This month, it will be exactly 22 years since the MAA first went online. After its initial release in 1994, the web browser Netscape had, by 1996, started to acquire users rapidly, in the process turning the new World Wide Web from a scientists' communications platform into a citizens' global network....

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MPWR 2016 and Beyond: Fostering Sustainable Networks for Women in RUME

By Erin Moss, Co-editor of DUE Point MPWR (Mentoring and Partnerships for Women in RUME) is a daylong seminar that began five years ago as a means to support women at all career stages—graduate student, postdoc, faculty and professional—in the RUME (Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education) community. Each year, the leadership team conducts this seminar...

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T-assessment: a Bold Suggestion Modestly Advanced

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin I sometimes use this column to float an idea I think deserves attention. Not on a whim, but after considerable thought and discussion with others expert in the relevant domain(s). This is one of those times. I already set the scene with last month’s post. Here is a nuanced, bullet-point summary...

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Math: EAGER: Assessing Impacts on Student Learning in Mathematics from Inclusion of Biological, Real-World Examples

By Audrey Malagon, Lead Editor of DUE Point Anyone who has taught calculus knows it is rich with real-life applications, especially in the life sciences. While there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that teaching calculus with an eye towards application has a positive impact on student learning, this project team wants to investigate that claim with...

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