Math Lit: A Good First Week!

We started our Math105 (Mathematical Literacy) course this week — two sections, with about 40 students at this point. As a first impression, I would say that the course is off to a good start based on the experience in the first 2 class meetings.

Our instructional design involves routine use of groups; each day has learning of new material based on each group dealing with information and questions. The Math Lit textbook does a good job of providing the framework for this learning, and students seem to be adjusting well to a math class that is very different. A central theme in class (group work and whole class work) is ‘reasoning’ both quantitatively and generally. This aspect of the course seems to be especially well matched to student needs, though it is not always comfortable for them.

As an example of this reasoning, we had a lively discussion in class about the phrases “at most” and “at least”. The problem had qualitative categories such as rarely, never, sometimes, etc; many students thought that any question about the information should be phrased with exactly the same vocabulary as the categories. Some students thought that the range of category question like we did was too ambiguous, and argued passionately for a different interpretation of them.

The content we are covering is already more diverse than our ‘traditional’ courses — we have done ordered pairs and coordinate systems, rates, scatterplots, and fraction concepts. So far, this diversity is being well received by the students. In some ways, students are doing better than we might expect for this level of a course (somewhat equal to a beginning algebra course in rigor).

One thing I’ll mention as a nice tool: a group quiz. The second class day, we started with a quiz taken in the same groups that we are using for learning; they were expected to discuss each problem and agree on a shared answer, and the problems included some small extensions of what they had experienced. After collecting the quiz, I asked the class what they thought of doing a quiz like that — the first response was “This helped us learn better.” My conjecture is that the discussions in the groups allows students a lower-stress way to discover the things not understood.

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