Students present at MAA-NJ
Posted in: Research Presentations
Doctoral students Emily Olson and John O’Meara recently presented their work at the annual meeting of the New Jersey chapter of the Mathematical Association of America. Their talk was titled “Understanding Factors that Influence Pre-Service Elementary Teachers’ Experience with Relevant Mathematical Modeling Tasks.” The talk was informed by their research projects in Dr. DiNapoli’s MATH 812 Research in Mathematical Modeling Education class last year. For their projects, both Emily and John enacted and studied pre-service teachers’ engagement with mathematical modeling activities: one activity investigated optimal bus routes on Montclair’s campus, the other activity explored successful pathways during gameplay of the classic arcade game PACMAN.
The pre-service teachers were students in Dr. DiNapoli’s MTHM 302 class and were experiencing authentic mathematical modeling for the first time. Their findings included that these pre-service teachers struggled to explicitly use mathematics in an open-ended, real-world scenario. Furthermore, these pre-service teachers needed ample support to move between the mathematical and real world, a crucial aspect of the mathematical modeling cycle. Still, with the skillful help of Emily and John, the pre-service teachers were able to make progress with these modeling activities and come to some realistic solutions. These findings, amongst others, have meaningful implications for teacher educators, specifically around the importance of using scaffolding pedagogies to support pre-service teachers’ exploration and creativity when encountering modeling problems, especially if they are new to mathematical modeling.
Doctoral student Michael Frimpong, alongside Dr. Steven Greenstein, facilitated a workshop at the same conference. They described their workshop as follows: “In this workshop, we engaged the audience in activities to demonstrate that our thinking is not confined to our brains. Rather, it’s both fully embodied and also extended through our interactions with material things. In a very real sense, making sense is that which we make of our senses. In terms of our teaching, these experiences also demonstrated that “mathy” objects can provide the experiential context for students’ meaningful learning of mathematics… at every level of mathematics.” Check out these pictures of workshop attendees thinking with some wonderful mathematical things.
