Transition Mathematics Project

The Re-Thinking Pre-College Math Project held a 2010 winter institute that highlighted promising developmental course restructuring strategies supported by the State Board’s new Re-Thinking Pre-College Math Project. The event was well attended (over 90 in attendance!) and featured Rose Asera, a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation as its kick-off presenter.
Bill Moore welcomed the group and asked everyone to introduce their team members. To read what each team/college was proud of along with one area of concern related to their math improvement efforts click here.

Rose Asera, Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation opened the institute by describing a conspiracy afoot albeit a joyful one. The theme of her session, The Statistics Pathway Network: Building a "Joyful Conspiracy". Dr. Asera highlighted the work of the Carnegie Foundation and the vision of a ‘joyful conspiracy’ as a strategy focused on shared needs, and a shared hypothesis of the problem. Every dimension of dev ed is being addressed for the development of this course, namely placement, content, instruction and delivery, organization and structure, assessment, policy and professional development. Full article

Jon Hasenbank PhD,an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse facilitated a workshop on "Framework for Procedural Understanding, Theory into Practice" He kicked his session off by highlighting the promising work of the TMP College Readiness Standards as being aligned with understanding. He reviewed student work that addressed the question, How well do you think your students ‘understand’ mathematics? One answer is that we cannot infer understanding from skilled execution of procedures. Dr. Hasenbank proceeded to outline dimensions of knowledge. Full article

Mike Burke, Professor of Mathematics at the College of San Mateo shared example after example of rich applications, work he developed through the Integrative Learning Project, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. In his session,"An Application-Driven Math Curriculum", Mr. Burke handed out data sets, posed questions based on the sets, and had institute participants think through and share the implications of the numbers. To date, Burke has used data sets to frame issues like gun control, the death penalty, and global warming. For a wonderful summary of Mr. Burke's work, read the Final Project Snapshot of "Integrative Learning in the Mathematics Classroom". In keeping with the theory of integrating math, Mr. Burke noted that he spends more of his time talking with his class about how you interpret what you've done than about the mathematics necessary to do it. Full article

The Friday morning session, "Transforming Pre-algebra Teaching and Learning through Faculty Inquiry", was facilitated by Jay Cho and Brock Klein, Pasadena City College. Dr. Brock Klein is director of Pasadena City College’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), which is committed to helping under-prepared, first-generation college students move successfully from basic skills to transfer-level courses. Jay Cho is a professor of mathematics at Pasadena City College (PCC) and has participated in the development of several innovative programs offered by the college's Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) since 2003. Full article

Pete Wildman, an instructor of mathematics at Spokane Falls Community College presented a breakout session described as "an application of the Teaching for Understanding Framework in a developmental math course". In this session he described to the group how to develop and implement a term project involving linear equations and data analysis in a beginning algebra course. The project involved data from the UN Millennium Project and he presented student work samples.

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