Mary Parkermparker@austincc.edu

http://www.austincc.edu/mparker/talks/jmm2012presented at Joint Math Meetings, Jan. 6, 2012

Rich Tasks

Build capacity for Productive Persistence

Make Explicit Connections

Provide Deliberate Practice.

Extensive ongoing evaluation of the course.

Developmental Math work integrated into lessons.

One at the beginning of each Topic. (See Cereal lesson handout – yellow - today.)

Interesting situation and questions that are somewhat beyond the level that an individual student can answer (easily, quickly, at all?)

Students work in groups.

Materials have scaffolding questions / information.

Instructor edition has much discussion of what to look for, say, etc.

Lots of talk about it.

Students sign contracts, witnessed by other members of their group.

Early in the semester, students identify what things might cause them to get discouraged and the group discusses how they can support each other.

Rich tasks and other activities have hard enough questions that students have to discuss multiple approaches to find what works.

Paper homework after class is similar to questions in the class activities and does not include rote practice.

The online component is basically an online book with many opportunities for engagement (open-ended questions, short answer questions, do simulations and comment, write questions or comments for teacher.)

The evaluative questions at the end of the section or topic are mostly multiple choice. (Good multiple choice questions!)

M.1. Numeracy Goal: Students will develop and apply the concepts of numeracy to investigate and describe quantitative relationships and solve problems in a variety of contexts.

M.2. Proportional Reasoning Goal: Students will represent proportional relationships and solve problems that require an understanding of ratios, rates, proportions, and scaling.

M.3. Algebraic Reasoning Goal: Students will reason using the language and structure of algebra to investigate, represent, and solve problems.

M.4. Functions and Modeling Goal: Students will understand functions as a way of modeling a correspondence between two variables. Students will be able to represent functions in various ways: verbally, algebraically, and graphically. Statway focuses on linear and exponential functions.

More details: www.statway.org under “Statway Resources.

Numeracy issues handled throughout the course.

Two-way tables are very useful for conceptually interesting percentage work.

Approach proportional reasoning through linear relationships which have a “natural zero” for the y-intercept.

Solve equations and inequalities in the context of modeling. (See Inequalities handout – green – today.)

 30-year Roof

20-year Roof

In Need of a New Roof

Total

Purchased insulation

8 5 4 17

Did not make a purchase

42 77 94 213

Total 50 82 98 230

Students haven’t been choosing to take statistics

because they see it as hard, even when the faculty in their majors talk with them about why it would be useful. (Nursing and other Health professions, especially.)

Haven’t had a good prerequisite course for Elementary Statistics.

“First math course where I feel like I understand anything.”

“My favorite college course. No one has ever let me talk about what I’m thinking so much.”

“When I read articles in the newspaper that talk about data, I feel like I know understand what they’re talking about.”

“Quit telling us stuff now. We need to get into our groups and figure it out.”

“I have trouble learning without more practice doing the computations. Will you give me more?”

“You didn’t give us very many practice problems doing the computations. How can you expect that I would do that correctly on the test?”

“I got that multiple choice question wrong because I didn’t read all the choices before I answered it.”

For both semesters:

Statway lessons and online learning materials from Statway.

Our usual MATH 1342 textbook and software (David Moore’s Basic Practice of Statistics)

Some supplemental materials on some of the math topics.

Statistics standards developed in cooperation with the Education section of the American Statistical Association.

Developmental mathematics standards developed with the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges and the Mathematical Association of America.

Three classes at ACC last fall, with a total enrollment of 72.

End of fall: 49 passed out of 55 still enrolled.

So far 45 have enrolled (and paid) for the second semester with still about six days of registration left. (We know who isn’t yet enrolled and they say they will enroll.)

We are pretty confident that almost all of those left will pass the second course.

Yes.

A few schools will be added during this academic year.

Considerably more schools will offer it next year.

Materials are Creative Commons License, so will be / are available.