I’ve been trying to find out for a while now about longitudinal studies on the graduation rates of students in developmental programs in college. The National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) has published a study which provides the data on that issue as well as many others. In fact you can create your own tables with their Quickstats feature. The… Read more →
Scrabble statshttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB123731266862258869.html#articleTabs%3Dinteractive
By way of Kevin Jarret’s blog on ed-tech, I’m trying our embedit.in, a web site that allows you to embed many types of documents in your web site. Here’s a presentation I recently gave at IMACC 09, a conference of community college educators in Illinois.
From time to time, I teach a freshman level course on liberal arts math. In the section on similarity of figures, there are a few exercises about reading maps and estimating distances. My students saw this as a pointless exercise in the age of GPS and Mapquest. And my comments about being stuck with only a paper map in the… Read more →
The March 2009 issue of PRIMUS, a journal for undergrad math education, focuses on faculty development. The articles are an interesting read for those who want to learn more about student centered math classrooms and varying types of assessments. Also, the January 2009 issue of PRIMUS has three articles on the use of wikis in math classes. The one on… Read more →
Of late, YouTube has been hosting many math videos, most of which give step by step explanations to a standard algebra or calculus problem. The Open Courseware project from MIT has posted many of their calculus lectures there as well. And it’s all free!I can pretty much type in a search term for a suitable math problem in Google and… Read more →
There have been quite a few articles recently discussing the mathematical models of the valuation of mortgage backed securities, and the house of cards that fell as a result. One appeared on WIRED and another in The New York Times . So what’s the take-away for college math education? Most of our math students are not in math intensive majors…. Read more →
I’ve been looking for a simple introduction to image processing that would appeal to students with modest math backgrounds. Most image processing materials are written for electrical engineers and are way above the level of a typical non-math major. So I was really glad to see this paper from the Electronic Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual International Conference on Technology… Read more →
Just about everyone seems enthralled by all things digital – iPods, digital cameras, and so on. But hardly anyone stops to think about the math that’s behind the digital craze. About a year ago, I started introducing examples using references to digital items that students are familiar with. They perked up – “hey – this is something I can relate… Read more →