This article outlines a series of lessons the author led to help students understand gerrymandering, which is the practice of drawing district boundaries to favor a particular group or party and which undermines the fairness of a representative democracy. These lessons were developed to capture student interest and engagement by linking…

This article provides conceptual ideas, data, and exercises, for integrating original sources of recent, state of the art, world-class life science research in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum and classroom. To this end, this article shows how one of the main goals of calculus in the life sciences, fitting parameters to data and assessing…

Mathematical word problems, sometimes called story problems, are generally defined as "verbal descriptions of problem situations, presented within a scholastic setting, wherein one or more questions are raised the answer to which can be obtained by the application of mathematical operations to numerical data available in the problem statement…

This article is about utilizing the process of building and exploiting models as a framework for inquiry in mathematics education research. We introduce and discuss a model of such a process and compare this model with key methodological features of design research in mathematics education. We argue that despite several communalities, educational…

Two examples of mathematical modelling are explored. Firstly, optimising the distance travelled when jumping from a swing is discussed. The second concerns optimising the distance travelled by monkeys when swinging from branch to branch.

Mathematical modeling and applications are an important part of curriculum and considered to be important for students' current and future lives. In this contribution, we focus on mathematical modeling from a cognitive prospective. Following embedding the cognitive perspective within the discourse of mathematical modeling, we describe some of the…

Too often, mathematics and science are taught in isolation from each other and from meaningful problems that matter to students. This book draws on the authors' experiences with teacher colleagues, including time spent in their classrooms co-developing and refining lessons. The core of their approach is to encourage learners to pursue solutions to…

The Cell Phone modeling task centers on a Fermi real-world estimation question. The task and rubric can be used at different grade levels to focus on the modeling process and classroom community. Finding time and space to engage students, especially novice modelers, in mathematical modeling can be a challenge, yet the benefits of modeling are…

The importance of mathematical problem posing has been acknowledged by many researchers. In this theoretical paper, we want to capture different meanings and aspects of problem posing by approaching it from three different levels: (1) by comparing definitions, (2) by relating it to other constructs, and (3) by referring to research and teaching…

In this article, we describe the generation of a Design and Implementation Framework for Mathematical Modelling Tasks (DIFMT) through a researcher-teacher collaboration. The purpose of the framework is to support holistic approaches to instructional modelling competency. This framework is underpinned by principles drawn from theory and praxis…

The teaching quality evaluation of college teachers is an important indicator of school evaluation, performance assessment and teacher promotion. However, the existing evaluation methods are only limited to the formal evaluation of teaching behavior, and have not achieved objective, reasonable and scientific evaluation results. The purpose of this…

Simple mathematical models can serve to reveal the essence of experimental phenomena and scientific concepts. The particle in a box (PIB), for example, is widely used in undergraduate programs to teach the quantum mechanical principles behind the UV--vis spectra of conjugated polyenes and polyynes. In this work, the particle on a ring (POR) and…

How might fourth graders address the problem of measuring the size of a leaf? And why might their classroom teachers choose such a shape to measure? One group of fourth-grade students in an urban Australian school were interested in knowing the sizes of leaves on a passionfruit vine growing at their school. The children were excited after a visit…

The purpose of the work described in this paper is to emphasize the importance of using mathematical models and mathematical modelling in order to be able to understand and to learn possible behaviours in epidemic situations such as that of the COVID-19 pandemic, besides suggesting modelling techniques with which to evaluate certain sanitary…

This curated collection covers a selection of PRIMUS articles published over a roughly 12-year period that focus on modeling and applications. The collection includes sections on individual projects, courses with a significant modeling component, and modeling and applications in extracurricular settings and throughout the curriculum.